Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, we're going to chew on a bold proposal.
Chris: Should distributions stop packaging most of our desktop apps?
Chris: And why Flathub might be the key to Linux's future, but perhaps its biggest risk as well.
Chris: Then after that, we're going to dig into Linux 6.16, which is landing with killer
Chris: file system upgrades, some retro Mac fixes, you won't believe, and more.
Chris: They're going to round the show out with some great boosts, some shout-outs,
Chris: some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual
Chris: lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Chris: Hello, hello, MiniMac. We don't hear you, but I see you. Hello there,
Chris: hello there. We have a small on-air, and then we have a delicate,
Chris: soft, quiet listening with a few folks up there as well. It's a quiet Sunday in the Mumble room.
Wes: Yeah, but we've got producer Jeff producing from the Mumble.
Chris: PJ, coming in from the mum. Pretty nice.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go to Defined.net slash unplugged and go check out Managed Nebula from Defined Networking.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that we love.
Chris: We love it because it's optimized for speed, simplicity. It has industry-leading
Chris: security, and you can completely self-host it if you like, or you can take advantage
Chris: of their managed Nebula project.
Chris: If you go to define.net slash unplugged, you can get it for free on 100 devices.
Chris: Unlike traditional VPNs, Nebula's decentralized design keeps your network resilient,
Chris: whether you're managing a home lab or a global enterprise.
Chris: They built it to scale in 2017 for Slack's global infrastructure,
Chris: so it had to work from the beginning to connect their vast infrastructure together.
Chris: Nothing else matches Nebula's level of resilience, speed, and scalability.
Chris: Try it out for yourself first. Start playing around with it.
Chris: Host a lighthouse and see how that works. They utilize this really cool system for lighthouses.
Chris: It's essentially a node that contains the routing information for your mesh
Chris: network, and it's really easy to host yourself.
Chris: The queries from your network hit these lighthouses, and then you can have multiple
Chris: lighthouses as well, so you can have uninterrupted operation.
Chris: So if one goes out, you have another one going, You're still going to be able
Chris: to connect to all your devices.
Chris: Of course, they have the managed offering as well, which handles a lot of this for you.
Chris: Nothing offers Nebula's level of resilience, speed, and scalability.
Chris: Go see why we're switching to Nebula and try it for free for 100 hosts.
Chris: No credit card required at defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: And thank you to Define for sponsoring the Unplugged program,
Chris: Define.net slash Unplugged.
Chris: So this week we're going to talk about something that's kind of far out there,
Chris: and it's a hot topic right now because the Fedora project is considering a proposal
Chris: of how they're going to handle flat packs from FlatHub and from Fedora directly
Chris: from Fedora 43 and beyond.
Chris: And in the immutable desktop world or the atomic desktop world,
Chris: this is very important because this is essentially how you distribute modern
Chris: desktop software is through flat packs and for those of you not aware there's
Chris: flat hub which is the public flat pack database and then there's fedora flat packs which.
Wes: Is a flat pack repository but maintained by fedora.
Chris: And currently there is a proposal titled filter fedora flat packs for atomic
Chris: desktops And the summary says, quote,
Chris: With this change, we want to make the availability of Fedora flatpacks an explicit
Chris: decision for Fedora Atomic Desktops.
Chris: Fedora contributors may package any application as a Fedora flatpack,
Chris: but those flatpacks will not be made available immediately to Atomic Desktop users.
Chris: Users that want to have access to all flatpacks from Fedora can remove the filter.
Chris: there's a debate going on right now if fedora should even be
Chris: in the business of packaging flat
Chris: packs there's very little maintenance that they see very little community engagement
Chris: they haven't even held some of their main meetings this is not a criticism because
Chris: they're a busy project there's a lot to do but there's very little documentation
Chris: how to build maintain or update fedora flat packs there's no procedure to remove
Chris: deprecated fedora flat packs,
Chris: And then building a Fedora Flatpak seems to be a different process than,
Chris: say, an upstream Flatpak that builds for Flathub. So there are different processes.
Wes: Oh, yeah, right. I mean, they're totally disconnected. You're using all your
Wes: regular RPM system and Fedora tooling to go build this version versus,
Wes: well, whatever Upstream's doing.
Chris: It does have some advantages. Fedora Flatpaks pay a lot more attention to free
Chris: software and make sure that they're building directly from the source.
Chris: They're built using the same source RPMs that the Fedora distribution packages are.
Chris: So, you know, if they're doing some patching there, something like that,
Chris: that gets included. So there are some benefits, but they're not getting particularly well maintained.
Chris: And they seem to be creating user frustration. There was an LWN article in this
Chris: realm, and some of the user comments really stuck with me.
Chris: One user wrote, I had to step through a user who was having a bizarre issue
Chris: with a package that I couldn't reproduce on the same Silverblue system.
Chris: After several comments and hours of debugging, I realized the user had mistakenly
Chris: installed the Fedora Flatpak version of a package that I had installed from
Chris: Flathub. The Flathub package worked fine.
Chris: They were frustrated, as I was, when they realized this, and they immediately
Chris: removed the Fedora Flatpak repository and reinstalled everything via Flathub.
Chris: And there's a couple examples of this. It creates frustration for the user. There's confusion.
Wes: There's definitely confusion, yeah.
Wes: We always see this a little bit when you do have separation between upstream
Wes: and who's doing the actual shipping to the end user.
Wes: But that's maybe where some of the like how much focus and bandwidth is available
Wes: for that as well because it's even worse if you don't have anyone there to actually
Wes: go figure out like, oh, is this a downstream issue or no, you should talk upstream.
Chris: The advantage that the Fedora flatpacks offer the Fedora project is they don't
Chris: have to worry about some of the legalese problems that might be in FlatHub packages
Chris: and things like that. It really always comes down to that.
Wes: Well, they have full control. The providence, the security can all be,
Wes: at least to more of an extent, vouched for or changed.
Wes: And when that's often sometimes, you know, for especially for like a common,
Wes: maybe in the future desktop apps, maybe there's concerns there around two of
Wes: what, what, what software do you show and sort of represents you and what control
Wes: do you have over it? I can understand that.
Chris: It's just if they're universal packages until they're not, and people are packaging
Chris: them differently and they have different repositories that overlay on top of
Chris: things and there's filters on top of this and that.
Chris: And so when you go to the website, you get different results than you do in the software center.
Chris: It's not a good user experience. And I think Flathub is becoming a bit of a
Chris: dominant player in this space.
Chris: I was just looking at their stats, which they make publicly available.
Chris: They're approaching, they're just on the cusp of 3.1 billion downloads.
Chris: They have 3,065 Linux desktop apps, of which 1,657 have been verified.
Chris: I don't know about any public stats for snaps and app images,
Chris: but that's a powerful presence.
Chris: And what I see here is a lot of duplication of effort.
Chris: And before I go any further, I want to just put this thought experiment out
Chris: to the audience and have you chew on this and tell us what you think.
Chris: Boost or go to the contact page.
Chris: As we go through this, think about this deeply.
Chris: If you're distributing switch to Flathub-only desktop apps, I'm not talking
Chris: about the core utils, talking things like Firefox, your text editor.
Chris: the things in the desktop email client if that all came from FlatHub as flatpacks
Chris: or snaps or app images what specific tool or workflow would break for you in that scenario.
Chris: What changes? Because let's consider a core problem that we hear over and over again.
Chris: Free software developers don't have enough time, don't have enough resources,
Chris: don't have enough money.
Chris: And then when you consider that Flathub is at almost 3.1 billion downloads,
Chris: or that things like the AUR, which are user-contributed packages,
Chris: can be the make-or-break success for certain distributions, I guess it begs a big question.
Chris: Should Linux distributions be packaging nearly everything that they are?
Chris: They're still packaging the entire world.
Chris: Is it time to revisit this classic role, reduce redundant efforts?
Chris: Some of that could be redirected to improving Flathub and Flatpacks.
Chris: And these distributions don't have to hold these massive repositories.
Chris: Like, this just put ClearLinux out of business.
Chris: The cost of ClearLinux repositories was one of the key contributors to having
Chris: to shut down ClearLinux.
Chris: So I want this to be out there as a thought experiment as we go through this,
Chris: because there was a really good blog post.
Chris: Brent, I think you got to take a crack at this last name here.
Chris: It's Michael Contazaro.
Brent: Oh, I think you nailed it. That's what I was going to go for.
Chris: No, really?
Brent: Contazaro. Why not?
Chris: Well, he had a really thought provoking blog post, and the title was Fedora
Chris: must carefully embrace FlatHub. And he argues that Fedora must strategically
Chris: shift towards Flathub to fully realize the benefits of an image-based,
Chris: Flatpak-centric desktop future.
Chris: And before you go, well, why is that the assumption?
Chris: Fedora has stated Silverblue and Kino Knight are the future of Fedora in their
Chris: 2028 strategy update outlook.
Chris: They write in there, Silverblue and Kino Knight are ready to be our desktop additions with Boot C.
Chris: We think image-based operating systems are the future. Let's commit.
Chris: So they're the ones saying it, not me,
Chris: But I happen to agree. After using Bluefin and Aurora and now Soltris OS,
Chris: these things are robust. They're hard to break. You can throw a lot at them.
Chris: This is clearly what end users and servers should be running.
Chris: And realistically, probably the future of RHEL, right? If this is where Fedora goes.
Wes: Well, and I mean, we've already just seen, right? RHEL's pushing on image mode.
Chris: Yeah, and they're very pumped about Bootsy. Now, it doesn't mean that RPM-based
Chris: distributions are going away. I think it's like a flippening happens.
Chris: The image based ones become the default and the RPM based ones kind of become
Chris: like the alt that's available.
Chris: Like how silver blue is right now, it flips and workstation RPM based is the
Chris: et cetera download and silver blue and Kino night are the primary.
Wes: That becomes the first thing you get to the one that's viewed as primary. It's a big change.
Chris: Yeah. We're not ready yet, but I think we could get there pretty quick,
Chris: actually. That's one of the things I've realized recently.
Chris: And I think the author is right in this post that Fedora Workstation,
Chris: as it is today, for a regular user, it's breakable.
Chris: Like if he gave it to a YouTuber, they'd break it.
Chris: They'd try to install Steam and uninstall their desktop. Something like that.
Chris: I really think it's better for users to switch to these image-based systems.
Chris: And I feel really strongly about this. And in that world, you don't package all these RPMs.
Chris: That's an old practice. Right.
Wes: I mean, just for a variety of reasons, but especially if all you're really using
Wes: the RPMs for is to build the base images, then you only really need the set of things in there.
Wes: You need to create a robust base Linux.
Chris: And I'm just trying to think, where else in history have we seen 3.1 billion
Chris: downloads from what is essentially a Linux app store?
Chris: FlatHub is the biggest success in this desktop app store-ish space that we've ever seen.
Wes: Well, I remember when it kind of switched, you know, we clued in that like,
Wes: oh, we could go find some good picks and other cool software from just browsing
Wes: what's new and popular on FlatHub.
Chris: And I also find the Fedora Flatpak experience bogus. And then you,
Chris: so you have, you know, everybody out there is packaging their own version of
Chris: Firefox. It's kind of crazy.
Chris: You know, if you think about it, if you're running Nix OS on one machine,
Chris: Ubuntu on one machine, and Silverblue, and then Fedora on another machine,
Chris: each one of those is technically running a slightly different version of Firefox
Chris: that has been packaged by somebody upstream.
Chris: That's bonkers if you think about it. And it's not how it works on macOS or Windows at all.
Chris: And it means all this work to repackage Firefox and TextEdit and Console across
Chris: all these distributions all the time.
Chris: It seems to me like we're stuck in this way of doing it because in a previous
Chris: life, a generation or two ago, how a distribution packaged software,
Chris: the way they packaged it, the way they broke it up, their default configurations,
Chris: that was one of the leading factors in how you picked a Linux distribution.
Chris: And it really mattered when software was being shipped on CDs.
Wes: Well, and just even the act of distributing it was a service,
Wes: right? Like it was either that or you're going to go build Firefox for yourself.
Chris: Because they're all like TARS on FTP servers.
Wes: Right.
Chris: And it truly, like the fact that you could get it in binary form and have these
Chris: repositories you could pull from was a genuine, unique value offering.
Wes: And maybe there was more too, you know, in terms of tying things together.
Wes: Maybe there was more patching or tweaks or initial configuration needed to make
Wes: it kind of be able to play nice with the rest of the desktop.
Wes: That's gotten a lot better too.
Chris: I think that culture is just so ingrained into us in Linux that we don't even
Chris: realize we're still building it that way, even though we don't need to anymore.
Chris: And I just think about the duplication of resources there.
Chris: and you know the status quo right now say on fedora workstation i'm
Chris: picking on fedora because i think fedora is actually becoming something kind
Chris: of special right now when you
Chris: set up fedora and you get it loaded it then comes up with a screen that says
Chris: would you like to set up fedora flat packs fedora rpms and the open h264 rpm
Chris: and there's this like if you and then if you don't like turn on the flat hub
Chris: then the next time you open up gnome software it'll then suggest it again,
Chris: and it'll also add a couple other RPM repositories.
Chris: And it's just such a bonkers out-of-the-box setup already.
Chris: And I don't think sticking with Fedora flatpacks in any way is going to make this better.
Chris: And maybe, you know, you package a few base must-have things and then all the
Chris: other stuff you pull from FlatHub.
Wes: Yeah, that's kind of this post-author's opinion, right?
Wes: Like maybe just have the stuff that you install by default,
Wes: you know that kind of represents you that's your public face that
Wes: you really need to be rock solid and maybe have a little more control over use
Wes: fedora flat flat pack for that but then yeah anything else that you want go
Wes: to flat hub although i think crucially right there's also a recognition here
Wes: that it's gonna if you want flat hub to improve enough to be suitable for this
Wes: purpose there's a lot of work to do and probably the fedora community should try and help,
Wes: And I mean, of course, the wider Linux community, I think we would argue too.
Brent: If this idea of, you know, a distribution having its own private flat hub offering
Brent: for its default applications, if every distribution then has its own,
Brent: don't we end up with the same like PPA problem that we've had in the Ubuntu
Brent: ecosystem where there's some installed by default?
Brent: And if you want what everybody else is using, then you end up with conflicts
Brent: or something like that. I don't know if that's really the future I want.
Chris: I agree with you there. And I think this is where distributions differentiate.
Chris: And they have different approaches on how they package the base system that you get.
Chris: Because you need to still have the core utils installed. You need to get the
Chris: Linux packages installed and all the stuff around that.
Chris: You've got to get all that set up. And you've got to have some base apps that
Chris: work right out of the box.
Chris: So I appreciate that problem.
Wes: I mean, yeah, there's the question of, like, where does your graphical terminal
Wes: come from? Do you have to ship that from the FlatHub version?
Chris: Well, Bluefin does.
Wes: It's true.
Chris: Aurora does, and it works great.
Wes: But that doesn't mean it's the only way that can work well.
Chris: I think it could be a Blueprint, though. I really do think they're onto something
Chris: here. And it also makes my system a lot more portable.
Chris: Like, I can rebase to different systems, and all my user apps stay there.
Chris: I think the core problem here is, is FlatHub ready for a responsibility like
Chris: this? That, I think, is a wider question, right?
Wes: Well, I just mean like if you, you may also want more gated controls and what
Wes: counts as a user app, right?
Chris: Why would you want more gated controls? Just because it's legal?
Wes: Well, no, no. What if upstream breaks your terminal that you just,
Wes: just after you did your most recent release?
Wes: We're going, you know, Linux Unplugged goes and does a review and the terminal app doesn't work.
Chris: But isn't that a problem?
Wes: I'm just arguing that there's, that's a debate of like, do you have some level
Wes: of control? because like that's a bit different than you know.
Chris: D packages you're presuming the packager has tested in a way that would catch
Chris: that before it goes downstream like the rpm version yeah i don't know if that's true for.
Wes: Like some of the stuff on the yeah.
Chris: I mean some of it would be but you know and then if.
Wes: You do any sort of release qa that's the kind of thing.
Chris: You would.
Wes: Launch the terminal.
Chris: That i so i think right so there there's a few things here that would have to
Chris: work you'd have to have some pretty robust testing,
Chris: Flat Hub would have to be probably a little more robust, right?
Chris: There's some good criticisms that we can get into if people are interested.
Chris: But if we're going to get into the Flat Hub criticisms, I'd like to bring a
Chris: Flat Hub person on board just to respond to them before we just blast a bunch of criticisms at them.
Chris: But some of them are pretty obvious. There's a thousand apps that run on end-of-life
Chris: runtimes, and the reasons for that are various.
Chris: Some of them are because they're not being maintained, but some of it are because
Chris: of compatibility reasons, like with NVIDIA drivers or whatnot.
Chris: And there are some apps that try to subvert the sandboxing or have overly broad
Chris: permissions, probably needs tightening up.
Wes: And we're still, I mean, it's been a long voyage, right, of working out all
Wes: the right holes and protocols and interfaces to, like, some apps couldn't be
Wes: sandboxed and still properly function.
Chris: Right.
Wes: So we're still kind of fixing some of those, too.
Chris: And I still think it's better than no sandboxing.
Wes: Yeah, for sure. Especially when you're still in proprietary apps.
Chris: The idea that the blog author floats it I think works kind of well, And I'm curious to know,
Chris: Brent, if there is maybe a middle ground here that you think would work is Fedora
Chris: clearly isn't capable or isn't comfortable just letting the whole hog flat hub
Chris: install anything you want that might be, you know, technically not legal.
Chris: That that bothers them. You know, they've always had to walk the line with legal.
Chris: This post author suggests that.
Chris: Gnome's got like a probably safe rating that they're introducing for applications.
Chris: You could essentially label things as probably safe, and maybe that's all the filtering you need.
Chris: So instead of right now what they have is an allow list that is essentially
Chris: blank at the moment, but they can block and allow certain apps from Flathub
Chris: with a pre-filter list that they have.
Chris: They're not really utilizing at the moment. There was a discussion around that.
Chris: But what if that pre-filter was just simply, by default, just show the probably
Chris: safe apps, And then there's a checkbox or a drop-down menu that you uncheck
Chris: that shows all the other apps if you want it.
Chris: Couldn't that be a pretty simple middle ground where they don't have to actively filter?
Chris: It's something that needs to happen anyways on the FlatHub side,
Chris: and the GNOME project already has some efforts around that.
Chris: Maybe this is a middle ground? Or is filtering just always going to be a lost cause?
Brent: Well, I feel like some visibility into the trustworthiness of a Flatpak is always good.
Brent: Everybody wins with that. but you end up with
Brent: this workload of someone has to go through
Brent: them and trust them and revisit
Brent: that trust on a regular basis and who
Brent: is responsible for um applying
Brent: that trust right is it the gnome project is
Brent: it like a bigger conglomerate of
Brent: like a bunch of distributions coming together with representatives that
Brent: filter through these so some transparency
Brent: i think it's really good this is a problem many distributions would want to
Brent: solve and me and as an end user and i think you guys too having more visibility
Brent: into the trustworthiness of uh you know publicly available flat packs on flat
Brent: hub is a definite win it's one of my huge hesitations with using flat packs for everything,
Brent: So, yes, I think it's super important, but it's not necessarily obvious how
Brent: to accomplish that in a way that isn't a bit nebulous.
Chris: And a burden on one particular set of people or something too.
Chris: Yeah, I'd love thoughts if people have thoughts around that.
Chris: I think the other thing that I want to put out there as a thought experiment is what if, just what if,
Chris: somewhere between 20% to 50% of the distro packaging maintainership out there is redundant work?
Chris: What if 20% to 50% of the apps that they're packaging are getting packaged by
Chris: their counterparts at 200 other Linux distributions?
Chris: Doesn't that seem like a wild misuse of resources and time when we have solutions now in place?
Chris: And even if some of us wouldn't prefer them and we would use other tools like
Chris: the AUR or the Nix package repository or maybe, you know, Debian would probably
Chris: never go this way. So you'd still have all that.
Chris: But like, you know what I'm saying? Like, it just seems even if it's 20%,
Chris: it's something worth talking about.
Chris: And then here's the other realization I've had in the last few weeks since we were in Boston.
Chris: using Bluefin and Aurora and Soltris OS.
Chris: Bluefin doesn't have a package repository at all.
Chris: The Bluefin devs are not wasting their time repackaging Firefox and all the
Chris: other apps for the 200th time.
Chris: And what I've realized is Fedora is about to enter their Debian Ubuntu moment.
Chris: We've said it on the show before, back in the day, why aren't there more distributions
Chris: based on Fedora like there's distributions based on Debian.
Chris: There's so many Ubuntu and Debian-based distributions and Arch-based distributions,
Chris: it's really kind of wild. But you don't see it around Fedora and SUSE as much.
Chris: Well, now we are seeing it around Fedora.
Chris: And Bluefin comes with a bunch of sane apps that humans would want to use with
Chris: sane defaults, just like Ubuntu did back in the day.
Chris: And it lets you just get to work. Silver Blue feels like installing the Debian
Chris: desktop after Ubuntu came out.
Chris: And it's got this weird kind of aesthetic.
Chris: It's got a super limited selection of applications. When you search,
Chris: the repositories feel really limited.
Chris: And it's this weird mix of new and old where you go over to Ubuntu and they've
Chris: curated a theme and a default selection of applications and settings for the
Chris: whole system that are very reasonable.
Chris: And app availability plays a huge part here because everything that's in Flathub
Chris: is available to me. And they have Bazaar or Bazaar, however you say it now,
Chris: to search apps. It's super fast and lean and mean.
Chris: And so while I do have a few FlatHub concerns, like old runtimes,
Chris: you know, and the fact that they do seem very GTK4, LibWadia,
Chris: GNOME focused, and, you know, I'm a Plasma guy mostly.
Chris: Like those are concerns I have, a bunch of other ones. But the difference is
Chris: so stark. and I don't think Fedora doesn't have to worry about it right now
Chris: because the UBlue based stuff is what, around 25,000 users total,
Chris: difference there is really something if you try silver
Chris: blue and then try bluefin it's very much an ubuntu debian experience and i think
Chris: fedora has to consider switching the way they deliver software to stay relevant
Chris: and stay competitive in this new future especially if kino knight and silverblue
Chris: like they say are their stated future yeah.
Wes: I mean if so yeah i think the things we're talking about here exactly what you
Wes: need to do to prepare for it so that your your base is well-optimized to live
Wes: in a future that is based around Flatpak.
Chris: Let us know, boost in, or go to the contact page if an app package,
Chris: if app packaging stopped being a differentiator, so say they mostly just went
Chris: with FlatHub except for the core stuff.
Chris: At that point, what would make you say pick Fedora over Debian or vice versa?
Chris: Say in the year 2028, they started implementing this stuff next year.
Chris: By the year 2028, most of your desktop applications are delivered via Snap or
Chris: AppImage or Flatpak, then what makes you pick a distro?
Chris: Are you looking for a distro that doesn't do that? What differentiates the distros now at that point?
Chris: Especially when you consider SystemD and the kernels kind of the same across all of them.
Chris: I'd love to know your thoughts, especially those of you that have been using
Chris: desktop Linux for a while.
Chris: Please boost in, support the show, or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Chris: 1Password.com slash unplugged. That's the number 1Password.com slash unplugged, all lowercase.
Chris: Go take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials
Chris: and protecting every application, even the unmanaged shadow IT.
Chris: If you're in security or if you're an IT professional, you know the mountain
Chris: of assets these days to protect.
Chris: From devices to identities and applications, It's just more and more all the time.
Chris: And with that, often comes a mountain of security risk.
Chris: But you can actually conquer that mountain of security risk with 1Password Extended Access Management.
Chris: You see, over half of IT pros say that securing SaaS apps, that's their biggest challenge right now.
Chris: And I can understand why, because it's just growing at such a rapid pace.
Chris: You could kind of call it sprawl.
Chris: And from that, you get your shadow IT, the stuff that's not even on your radar.
Chris: It's not hard to see why. Users are just trying to get stuff done.
Chris: That's where Trellica comes in by 1Password. It will discover and secure access
Chris: to all your apps, managed or not.
Chris: Trellica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company.
Chris: And then it has pre-populated app profiles that can assess the SaaS risks,
Chris: letting you manage access.
Chris: You can also optimize your spend and get a handle on that, even quantify it.
Chris: And enforce security best practices across every app your employees use,
Chris: even the ones you didn't know about initially.
Chris: Now, 1Password came along, and they just changed the password game for managing
Chris: your identities online.
Chris: And they've done it in a way that's very approachable by end users and manageable by IT.
Chris: Well, that only a million times more, right?
Chris: That award-winning strategy now applied at the application level.
Chris: You have to really go check it out. So go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: That's where you have to take the first steps because there's more to secure than just passwords.
Chris: Managed and unmanaged SaaS applications, for instance, are a big deal.
Chris: Trelica by 1Password will secure your apps without leaving your employees behind.
Chris: There are a lot more options now, and Trelica by 1Password can help you take
Chris: control of your SaaS environment.
Chris: Check compliance off your list and reduce unnecessary costs by analyzing app
Chris: usage and using data to identify and eliminate unused licenses and redundant apps.
Chris: It really, truly does make things better for both you and the end users.
Chris: Check it out and support the show by going to 1password.com slash unplugged.
Wes: Okay, well, you can tell a kernel release is a good one.
Wes: When checking my notes here, I'm posting at five minutes after midnight about,
Wes: oh my gosh, there's just so much great stuff in 6.16.
Chris: Is that Larble?
Wes: No, that was me.
Chris: Oh, that was you? I could see being either one.
Wes: That was after me reading like most of the changes in the kernel and having
Wes: a hard time picking which ones I wanted to even attempt to slot into the show.
Chris: I agree. This is one of those where we could go on for two episodes about all
Chris: the new stuff because NVIDIA Blackwell saw a bunch of improvements.
Chris: The new Intel stuff, RISC GPU drivers saw a lot of work. Even Ethernet drivers.
Chris: Virtualization improvements. Just a whole raft of stuff and,
Chris: of course, some new Rust stuff as well.
Chris: Like new Rust kernel driver bindings and things like that.
Wes: Yeah, the Rust effort marches on. More subsystems get in interfaces.
Chris: I don't know what it is about the three of us, though, but something about the
Chris: file system news just really seems to be the most exciting to us.
Chris: I think it's, I blame Brent because he's always talking about building a file
Chris: server, so it's your fault, Brent.
Brent: Well, I know how to get you going.
Wes: He's perennially doing a backup, so.
Chris: It's, I think also, it's amazing the amount of improvements and work that are
Chris: landing across the various file systems still.
Wes: Everyone wins with 6.16.
Chris: Yeah, really. ButterFS continues to get faster in 6.16. The biggest highlight
Chris: this cycle is performance for ButterFS.
Chris: There's been buffer conversion work that helps metadata-heavy operations,
Chris: so you get throughput and runtime improvements.
Wes: Yeah, plus 50% throughput, minus 33% runtime. That sounds great.
Chris: On top of that, cleanups and efficiency tweaks, they say, So some just nice
Chris: overall gains from that. It's good to see that too.
Chris: Leaner and meaner ButterFS in Linux 6.16, even when dealing with lots of metadata.
Chris: ButterFS has been going through a six plus year cycle of improvements in every Linux release.
Chris: I mean, think about how that stacks up over time. So if you haven't tried ButterFS
Chris: yet, your perception might be a little out of date because I'm talking literally
Chris: every kernel release for the last six years, has had really nice butter FS improvements.
Chris: What hasn't seen a lot of improvement for a while, because it's just pretty
Chris: stable, but saw some big changes this release was...
Wes: That's right, Extended 4.
Chris: It's been a minute, but 6.16 introduces notable performance enhancements for
Chris: Extended 4, primarily focused on three areas, fast commit improvements,
Chris: multi-FS block atomic write support, and big ALEC file systems,
Chris: and most significantly large folio support for regular files.
Wes: Yeah, as Ted So wrote, this last result there, the large folio support,
Wes: it can show really stupendous performance for the right workloads.
Chris: Stupendous, huh?
Wes: Yeah, stupendous.
Chris: What is stupendous? Can you measure stupendous?
Wes: For example, see, he links here, we'll put that in the notes,
Wes: where the kernel test robot reported over 37% improvements on a large sequential I.O.
Wes: workload. nearly 40 percent intel's kernel test robots so props to them.
Chris: So we're going back to Extended 4, boys?
Wes: I guess so.
Chris: Scrap your head now, Brent. We're starting over. We're going to Extended 4, okay?
Brent: You can do both, right, I think? Can't we do both?
Chris: Yeah, we'll do LLVM on top of it. It'll be fine. LLVM on top of it.
Chris: Last but not least in our batch of updates, well, not last, but almost last,
Chris: is XFS. So second to last, but still.
Chris: XFS officially merged Atomic Write Support.
Wes: That's a big one.
Chris: Yeah. I believe it was developed by an engineer built upon groundwork done by
Chris: another engineer at Oracle.
Chris: So some Oracle time went into that.
Chris: It enables atomic writes primarily for single block operations due to limitations
Chris: in alignment and extent coverage.
Chris: A software-based fallback method is available and introduced for misaligned
Chris: or multi-extent writes, leveraging XFS's ref link copy on write mechanism.
Wes: I know, right? Even XFS is partially copy-on-write these days.
Chris: Hmm. Interestingly, tested it using MySQL databases and saw some nice performance improvements.
Chris: Additionally, experimental warnings for features like the PNFS and Scrub and
Chris: parent pointers features have been removed in 6.16, so they're no longer considered
Chris: experimental features.
Wes: Oh.
Chris: So XFS has Scrub now. It's got copy-on-write. It's got atomic write support.
Wes: Yeah, that makes sense, too, especially for databases. This kind of thing is
Wes: definitely nice. So XFS is an excellent database backing system.
Chris: You're talking a super high integrity file system now with reliable write consistency.
Chris: That's just great to see.
Wes: But do I want the atomic write support in XFS or do I really want to try out
Wes: the stupendous performance in the XT4? How many file systems am I going to have to make here?
Chris: Well, let me throw one last one at you. Our buddy, Kent Dover Street,
Chris: of course, got some BcacheFS improvements in 6.16.
Chris: And you know we love following this. Key highlights include performance improvements
Chris: with faster snapshot deletions, faster device removal, and coalesced accounting updates.
Wes: Yeah, basically it's kind of when you have metadata and accounting updates,
Wes: you batch them together before going to the transaction to commit to put a little
Wes: less pressure on the journal, which should just generally be good for performance.
Chris: Also in 6.16, there is significant progress on the self-healing and recovery
Chris: features of BcacheFS with background recovery passes triggered upon error detection
Chris: and a new recovery pass for the rebalance of Btree.
Chris: So it detects it in the background and initiates the repair.
Wes: Yeah, Kent's pretty much just been in bug fix and repair mode.
Chris: Error message enhancements, better error messages.
Wes: Yeah, just everything in, like, making it more robust and resilient and better
Wes: at telling you what's happening and what's wrong.
Wes: And more stats. I mean, there's stats encounters all over the place.
Chris: I don't know what this means for 6.17.
Wes: No, I don't think anyone does. I mean, Kent and Linus might, but we do not.
Chris: But also it was nice to see Linus merging a last-minute fix in 6.16 for a user-reported
Chris: bug, resolving an issue with encrypted file systems.
Wes: Yeah, this is all very nice to see because I think it just means if there is
Wes: going to be uncertainty around how you should be getting your BcacheFS,
Wes: 6.16 will be a really great kernel to be on for a while until that shakes out.
Brent: This also marks the end of that little pause of BcacheFS being merged into the kernel. Is that right?
Chris: Well, it kind of marks this. Well, so it's marking the start.
Chris: This that drama unfolded throughout the beginning development of 616.
Brent: I got it.
Chris: And so what Linus kind of said is, all right, I'm going to accept these packages.
Chris: And then he said, we're going to part ways after that.
Chris: So I think what Linus and Ken are both kind of maybe offline or just have come
Chris: to some sort of a quasi agreement is they're trying, like Wes said,
Chris: get it into a state where if it gets removed from the Linux kernel for a while,
Chris: you're going to be OK on 6.16 until things get resolved.
Chris: And now the pause begins, but we don't know what that pause looks like.
Chris: we just have to wait and see I've made my feelings pretty clear about it I think
Chris: bcachefs is a critical Linux,
Chris: feature, probably more important than some of the other things that are getting
Chris: worked on right now in my personal opinion, but what the hell do I know but
Chris: we'll keep an eye on it and see where things go for 6.17, so it's nice to see
Chris: bcachefs get in a good state as good as can be at this stage,
Chris: before that happens.
Wes: Yeah, Ken's definitely been putting in a lot of hard work.
Chris: One of the distributions that's jumping on Linux 6.16 really early that I didn't expect is Ubuntu.
Chris: Kinda. You see this? This is interesting.
Wes: I guess for their concept ISO, which is for the Snapdragon X1 laptops.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, 6.16 has patches and fixes for some of these Snapdragon
Chris: SOCs and the components in there.
Chris: and 616 adds device tree support for the
Chris: dell latitude 7455 the inspiran
Chris: 7441 and the xbs 139345 now
Chris: you have a working fingerprint sensor um in there
Chris: and also i guess the zenbook a14 received some fixes so i
Chris: think ubuntu was just kind of motivated to ship this pretty fast um which is
Chris: great i guess also there was a fixed because uh grub was having trouble supporting
Chris: systems with more than 32 gigs of ram you run into these things in the arm land
Chris: because we haven't had a lot of powerful arm boxes until recently no.
Wes: We have not.
Chris: And then boom all of a sudden we're shipping them like real computers which
Chris: is nice to see uh so if you have one of these cutting edge arm devices and you're
Chris: running ubuntu you should probably be trying out the concept iso and.
Wes: Maybe you're telling us how it goes because i'm real curious.
Chris: Okay so i.
Wes: Know what you you have clearly have a favorite here.
Chris: There this one's really great um i don't know there's something about just getting
Chris: a little bit out of these old computers that I'm a big fan of.
Chris: And it's something that just sat for a long time, didn't see any love.
Chris: I think somebody discovered it in Linux 2.6.12. They discovered this issue in June of 2005.
Chris: It was a problem that was really only cropping up on vintage Macintosh 2s.
Wes: What?
Chris: Yep. It stemmed from an off-by-one error that caused the system to report a
Chris: Mac 2 as just a Macintosh unknown. Apple Macintosh unknown.
Chris: What a bummer of a bug, right?
Wes: You go to all the trouble of running Linux on your Mac 2, only to not really
Wes: get it to display correctly.
Chris: Yeah, and the system can't recognize there's no to do with it.
Chris: So a Linux hobbyist using a real Macintosh 2 discovered the bug when booting the Linux kernel.
Chris: The fix was merged alongside another minor Motorola 6800 update.
Chris: For us in the know, that's the M68K line, including a little conversion and
Chris: update for default configurations to the strscpy function.
Chris: but it's pretty cool so it fixed this old bug that's been around since 2005
Chris: this off by one error that caused the old Mac 2 to be labeled as Apple Macintosh
Chris: unknown now it gets properly labeled,
Chris: and there's just something I think really great about seeing,
Chris: Linux still getting work for these old retro systems it just worms from hurt yeah.
Wes: It's just kind of cute.
Chris: And while we're cutting you.
Wes: Know there's still a little bit of community spirit left in this corporate kernel of ours.
Chris: Yeah yeah Maybe some places don't, you know, they don't want 32-bit support
Chris: anymore, but it's nice to see if you could get it working. It kind of makes me want to do it.
Chris: I'd love to try to get an old Mac running Linux and then figure out a way to
Chris: get a web browser or running like a web server on it, making a server.
Chris: That's what I'd like to do. And then open it up to the audience. Come on.
Wes: You know, serves your personal web page.
Chris: So you did a little bit of digging there, Westpain, and you just found a whole
Chris: bunch of links that we can throw in the notes. Some of it just like good background
Chris: on the 6.16 development work cycle.
Chris: But you got some specific stories and a few findings. Anything you want to highlight before we?
Wes: Yeah, well, I kind of just, yeah, I did. We'll have some links for just if you
Wes: want to review this stuff. And then I kind of dug through, like LWN had a great list.
Wes: Phronix, of course. And then Colonel Newbies is out ahead on 6.16 too.
Wes: So I just have a little lightning round of neat stuff, I noticed.
Wes: To start, Core Dumps can be sent to a Unix socket instead of just being written
Wes: to a file or spawning a user mode helper.
Wes: and this is part of a bunch of work to try to make the core dump interface more
Wes: secure because i guess there's been a flow of core dump related cves and some
Wes: of the kernel developers are getting a little fed up with that so that's kind of interesting to see,
Wes: You were speaking about I.O. Euring.
Chris: In the bootleg pre-show.
Wes: Indeed. Well, I.O. Euring can now be used to create pipes. Yeah,
Wes: that's right. Super fast pipes.
Chris: Hey, I like fast pipes. I'm all about fast pipes.
Wes: There's now something that you can do called zoned loop block devices,
Wes: which emulate a generic block device using multiple files on an existing file
Wes: system to basically let you emulate zoned devices for testing,
Wes: for whatever you need to do with that. That's kind of neat.
Chris: Hmm. Well, that's something we might be able to play around with.
Wes: Yeah, it kind of sounds fun. And, which this does not always happen with new
Wes: kernel features like this, there's some pretty nice documentation that exists right out of the gate.
Chris: Yeah, I was just looking at that right now. Like, get up and running with it
Chris: kind of documentation and how to use it. That's fantastic.
Wes: Here's something you hopefully don't actually have to watch out for,
Wes: but, you know, like we say, don't break user space.
Wes: 6.16 is actually removing a system call, the ancient use lib system call.
Wes: It's been deprecated for quite some time.
Wes: It's actually been removed, and as they say, hopefully without breaking any
Wes: user space applications. It's just you don't see that all the time, so watch out.
Wes: I did notice there's a bunch of audio hardware support that's coming along,
Wes: but including a six-channel professional DJ mixer.
Chris: Whoa, really?
Wes: The DJM V10 from Pioneer.
Chris: Oh, let's do it, boys. We'll get a mix
Chris: going. Brent could be on the drums Soundboard guy could be on the mixer.
Wes: That's right This.
Chris: Is actually a really nice looking.
Wes: It seems like a good rig Yeah it does I mean I don't DJ but No It looked real nice on the shelf Says.
Chris: It has elite sound quality.
Wes: Okay this part's getting me really excited Alright There's a new API That will
Wes: let virtual memory allocations Persist Across KExec handovers Oh,
Wes: Yeah Uh huh This could This could this could do a lot because now you kind of
Wes: have like an official way for the two kernels to like pass information.
Chris: Oh man.
Wes: I've been emulating this with my like persistent memory hack sort of thing for
Wes: file systems but you know having it be first class in the kernel could lead
Wes: to some really cool tools.
Chris: When we had the disposable system that was created through KExec that was one
Chris: of the things that we kind of had to work around.
Chris: Now we could just have that functionality built in. We're definitely going to
Chris: play with that in the future. Yeah.
Wes: I found something for Brent here. Crash dump kernels can now reuse existing
Wes: Lux keys, which means crash dumps can actually be made to encrypted file systems
Wes: now, which was not previously possible.
Chris: That is big.
Wes: Yeah. And you can imagine it probably took some careful work to get that all
Wes: aligned without breaking anything.
Brent: It's a feature I didn't realize I needed.
Wes: That's right.
Chris: You need to save your dumps, Brent.
Wes: Maybe you've used like the ffa notify command where
Wes: you can like watch for changes in files there's now
Wes: a feature where users with the cap sysadmin capability in
Wes: a user namespace but no special permissions in the root namespace can watch
Wes: file systems and mounts with fa notify so now you can have like containers in
Wes: a user namespace they just need cap sysadmin and then they're allowed to like
Wes: watch all their own files it's
Wes: just beefing up the things you can do with containers securely interesting.
Chris: Interesting way to go about getting that information to the container okay.
Wes: Usb audio devices now support audio offloading this lets for example audio from
Wes: a usb device continue to flow even when the rest of the system is sleeping what whoa yeah,
Wes: so you could like basically tell it where tell the network stuff i guess like
Wes: where in memory to read from the USB and have it just flow with the rest of
Wes: the system, not needing to do anything.
Wes: And then Greg KH pointed out that I think this takes the record for the most
Wes: number of patch series, 30 plus, over the longest period of time,
Wes: two plus years to get merged properly, at least for USB things.
Chris: I mean, that is so fun and neat and awesome. I want to play with that.
Chris: See, this is, I am getting excited and nerded out by Linux kernel features.
Chris: This is a good batch This is a good batch This.
Wes: One is going to be big for those AI workloads The contents of device memory
Wes: Can now be sent via TCP Allowing zero copy transmission From a GPU to the wire.
Chris: The contents of device memory Can now be sent via TCP That's crazy That is huge
Chris: for AI workloads They're going to build on top of that immediately Yeah.
Wes: I think it's been some people been asking for.
Chris: Allowing zero copy transmission From a GPU to the wire,
Chris: Whoa, there is, that's a big feature.
Wes: Something closer to home. I know we're all, you know, we love things like WireGuard and Nebula, but.
Chris: What'd you say?
Wes: WireGuard.
Chris: There you go.
Wes: If you are an OpenVPN user, that's going to get better with 6.16 because there's
Wes: now a virtual driver for offloading some operations that OpenVPN does to the kernel.
Chris: That will make a difference. So the, like, is it probably encrypt stuff that's
Chris: going to be offloaded to the kernel?
Wes: Yeah. Let's see. I do have.
Chris: I know. I should have looked myself. So they're creating a virtual driver for the data channel. I see.
Chris: I guess that makes sense why it would impact large transfers. That'll be nice.
Wes: Okay. You know we love eBPF here.
Chris: Yeah, buddy.
Wes: You can do traffic control, right? Like traffic control stuff for queuing and
Wes: making your network play nice, quality of life kind of stuff.
Wes: you can now implement custom traffic control queuing disciplines,
Wes: basically like the algorithms for how it works, using eBPF.
Chris: Oh, so on the fly, essentially.
Wes: Yeah, you don't have to build a custom new kernel module that implements this
Wes: queue disk sort of interface. You can now do it with eBPF.
Chris: Hmm, I wonder how that could be used for dynamic rebalancing of prioritization and stuff.
Wes: Maybe driven by some sort of AI that's watching your network.
Chris: Or really, just like, you know, what I would love is some integration with Home
Chris: Assistant where it's like, okay, streaming mode, and now the set-top box gets
Chris: all the traffic prioritization.
Chris: And you hit another button, and now it's like my computer for work gets all the prioritization.
Chris: Wouldn't that be amazing to be able to integrate it at the Home Assistant level
Chris: and then tie it to like a Z-Wave button?
Wes: Yes. I love it.
Wes: Okay, good news for virtualization this time around. KVM support on RISC-V,
Wes: no longer experimental.
Chris: Uh-oh.
Wes: Huge news for Intel if you want to do confidential guests.
Wes: x86 virtual machine hosts on KVM now support TDX, enabling the use of confidential
Wes: guests on Intel processors, something already possible on the AMD side,
Wes: but has been in the works for literally years.
Chris: Quote, literally years, yeah.
Wes: Uh-huh, and includes a large number of patches.
Wes: And then nested virtualization support on 64-bit ARM is also now working.
Wes: It's disabled by default. It's still kind of new, but that's cool.
Chris: So RISC-V and ARM seeing some seriously nice virtualization improvements. Yeah.
Wes: And then on a note on the way out here, there's now an AI-written shell script
Wes: in the kernel source tree.
Chris: Really?
Wes: Uh-huh. It's called gitresolve.sh, and it was at least co-created with the use of some LLM technology.
Chris: I saw, too, there was some discussion, the kernels coming up with some standards around AI tooling.
Wes: Yeah, they're doing a lot of discussion around that, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, so they're trying to get that sorted out, too. And it doesn't sound like
Chris: the rule is no tooling, but it has to follow certain standards.
Wes: As LWN says, not only does it work, this script, but it includes a full set
Wes: of self-tests, something that the author noted, with understatement,
Wes: is unusual for code found in the kernel's scripts directory.
Wes: LLMC said, won't give you a frowny face when asked to generate tests.
Chris: I noticed the restraint. There was one feature you didn't mention here.
Chris: The power management subsystem has gained rust abstractions for managing the
Chris: CPU frequency and operating performance points.
Wes: Yeah, a whole bunch of stuff there. Also, new abstractions for core memory management operations.
Chris: Yeah, and other drivers.
Wes: Yeah, there's a lot of good rust work happening without a ton of fanfare just going on under the hood.
Chris: It's incredible. This and this, by the way, this is the high level.
Chris: This is us doing like there's all kinds of security improvements and fixes across
Chris: all kinds of subsystems and new features that we didn't even touch.
Chris: that's where kernel newbies can really do
Chris: a heavy lift and if you really want to geek out and
Chris: spend an evening reading through everything we'll link to
Chris: some of the best resources in our show notes this week so you can do just that
Chris: because what other project in the world is kicking ass this hard this far in
Chris: and shipping stuff like this on a general platform that's available to the entire
Chris: world and everyone can build on top of this massive win by the kernel team 616 is a winner.
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged. Unleash your hardware and see what you can build.
Chris: If you're ready for the ultimate homelab that'll scale with your skills and
Chris: your desires as they grow, Unraid is what you have been waiting for.
Chris: I know a lot of you are still very interested in virtualization.
Chris: Okay, what? No, I tease. Actually, it's still great. And Unraid makes it even
Chris: more approachable, not only with a nice interface, but they're sitting on top
Chris: of a stack of winning Linux virtualization technologies.
Chris: They give you a brilliant interface to pass through things like your GPU or other hardware.
Chris: They have support for Virgil support, which means you get virtualized 3D graphics.
Chris: There's some potential there when you start thinking about maybe centralizing
Chris: one nice graphics card and then using your machines around the network to access
Chris: that graphics card, so you only have to buy one, you know?
Chris: And then also there's a whole ginormous library of community applications,
Chris: including a lot around local LLMs.
Chris: So if you want to deploy, there's several different options there and there's
Chris: even things that will let you essentially set up an open API-like interface
Chris: in front of your local LLM so you can use applications that talk to OpenAI but
Chris: they're actually talking to your local LLM running on top of Unraid.
Chris: And if you haven't checked out Unraid for a minute, 7.1 is taking things to the next level.
Chris: With the ZFS support for one, They still support the mismatched drive sizes,
Chris: so you can upgrade as you have capacity as a new drive comes into your rotation,
Chris: or if you've got some dis sitting in the closet right now that aren't all the same size.
Chris: And they've made a really big improvement as far as I'm concerned.
Chris: Built-in wireless networking.
Chris: Now, I know that's a weird one for a lot of you, but for me,
Chris: where I can't run Ethernet,
Chris: Huge. And the other thing that I really appreciate, I think this really kind
Chris: of speaks to their whole model, is they're building in the latest Linux features, right?
Chris: Faster Linux kernel ships in 7.1, for example.
Chris: That's because they have a sustainable model here. They ask a reasonable price
Chris: and they continue to build this thing.
Chris: They've been doing that for a long time.
Chris: and if you go to unraid.net slash unplugged, you can try it for free,
Chris: 30 days, no credit card required, a great way to support the show and a great
Chris: way to scratch that itch, deploy some applications really quickly,
Chris: utilize some disks you have sitting around, maybe you've got an old laptop or
Chris: an old PC or maybe you want to build something.
Chris: Unraid can be that secret little bit that just gets you going fast and you know
Chris: you're building a reliable, scalable, long-time supportable system.
Chris: So check it out. Go to unraid.net slash unplugged.
Brent: Well, we have all sorts of shout outs to make this week. We have a bunch of
Brent: new members to Jupyter Party and others.
Brent: Nicholas G joined Jupyter Party this week, along with Hoa F.
Brent: And then we have a bunch of core contributors to Linux Unplugged.
Brent: Matthew Y., Brett B., and Jonathan S. Thank you for joining us in the party.
Chris: Yes thank you for supporting us we really
Chris: appreciate it hope you enjoy the member content check out the
Chris: bootleg there is the bootleg promo code
Chris: it's still active it takes 15 off the unplugged core contributor or the whole
Chris: network jupiter.party membership and it's going fast there are four slots left
Chris: as of this episode i went and double checked the accounting four slots left
Chris: for the promo code bootleg to get in there and support the show directly and
Chris: get the extra bonus member content,
Chris: We have a shout-out, too, for the community this week. Wes, I think you should
Chris: take this one because you were there in the thick of it right after I kind of
Chris: just created a massive problem out of the blue. Just blew things up.
Wes: Yeah. Well, you were trying to, I think, provide some good value for your This
Wes: Week in Bitcoin members by putting on some member-exclusive stuff with Fountain's
Wes: new Podcasting 2.0 sort of member content.
Chris: A little bonus content. A little bonus content. but.
Wes: The system required that like it also inserted a trailer in the public feed.
Chris: Yeah it's it's neat because it's all feed-based so you don't
Chris: have to have like a special platform but that means that
Chris: all of a sudden instead of having a full episode in the feed we have like a
Chris: one minute trailer and the system is designed well a new item in the feed let
Chris: me go automatically create a post on the website and we don't want to post on
Chris: the website for a one minute trailer yeah so um sorry everybody sorry i didn't warn you you.
Wes: Like to experiment in production uh and uh thankfully uh chance our dear scraper
Wes: and website co-maintainer there and scraper maintainer was quick in action to get it all fixed up.
Chris: Yeah so we weren't posting silly little one-minute trailers to the jupiter broadcasting
Chris: website after i just randomly had one pop up in the feed so.
Wes: We are super appreciative of that.
Chris: Can i post an episode at all right now yeah.
Wes: It's all ready to go.
Chris: Man thank you chance boy i really appreciate that.
Brent: What i heard you ask there was can i break it again this week.
Chris: Will it work will it work.
Brent: We do have a couple pieces of mail
Brent: from the mail bag here that we'd like to push to the front one the first one
Brent: here from aiden hey all i like the discussion on managing nixos configs in the
Brent: last episode and wanted to share the method to my madness i keep all my configs
Brent: in a flakes repo on github well done which is managing around a dozen hosts.
Brent: I keep my user preferences like shells, aliases, GNOME, configuration extensions, etc.
Brent: all in a file for my user and each host has its own file to add unique settings like the hostname.
Brent: I'm using it to manage my home server as well as several workstations and gaming
Brent: setups used by both myself and some of my family members.
Brent: It makes pushing out software to computers in the house incredibly easy,
Brent: and I can get a new computer added to it with just a short commit and passing
Brent: the flake name to NixOS install.
Brent: And here's a link to that repo.
Chris: This seems like the setup I basically need to get on.
Wes: And now you can.
Chris: I really should. So...
Chris: I have really resisted this kind of thing, but the idea that I could have a
Chris: system where maybe I make a few changes in a config file,
Chris: commit that to my Git repo, and then my downstream systems just assimilate that
Chris: change and adapt maybe even automatically in the background,
Chris: and build a new image, and the next time I reboot I just have the changes.
Brent: Did I hear you say you're going to start using Git to finally track your Nexo as config?
Chris: I really should, because right now I just keep everything in my home directory.
Wes: It's easy to get started.
Chris: Uh it you know it's like it's like setting up mqtt i just i just don't want
Chris: to have to do it i just i want it to be simple enough where i don't have to
Chris: you know i love the days where i could take the whole system copy to a floppy
Chris: disk and then i could take that to another system and copy it over and i'm done well.
Wes: You can do that.
Chris: You just have to.
Wes: Get a floppy that works.
Chris: I'm thinking that's what i should do wouldn't that be funny if i just went hard
Chris: the other direction this goes back three.
Wes: Separate floppies at all times with your.
Chris: Next So that's what I revision. I just, yeah.
Wes: You got a little label maker.
Chris: The problem is the era of the floppy disk, as we discovered when we did a little
Chris: experimenting, is over.
Chris: USB floppy disks do not show up as a traditional floppy drive.
Chris: They show up as more like a, almost like a CD-ROM or a virtual USB storage device.
Brent: I hear tapes are still.
Chris: Dude, I love tapes. I'm all about that.
Brent: I just want to say Aiden this comes at a perfect time because I stayed up way
Brent: too late last night with my brother trying to figure out how to do a multi host
Brent: Nixos flake so thank you for saving us dude.
Chris: This is like when he repaired the van door and didn't include me it's like bro
Chris: this is like what we bro up about and then like he just bros out without us.
Brent: I guess with his original bro yeah.
Chris: You're right about that well I was probably tossing and turning.
Brent: Okay, I'll try next time.
Wes: All right, Kmog wrote in, Remember here, re-immutable use using NixOS everywhere at home.
Wes: I'm also a Nix packages maintainer for the bucket software. Well,
Wes: thank you. That's awesome.
Wes: I am looking at perhaps Fedora Core for work.
Wes: I think it would work as a great tailscale subnet router. Since those machines
Wes: have one job and being Red Hat adjacent, I can get corporate buy-in.
Wes: As far as NixOS config version control, I put a really generic file on the machine
Wes: that imports from my personal Git server using SSH. Oh, neat.
Wes: This way I can work with the configuration from anywhere and simply push the
Wes: new config to the server. I really don't care what happens to the local at scenics OS folder.
Chris: That's a great setup too. I like that KMogged. And thank you for being a member too.
Chris: Okay, I need to up my game. I can feel I'm old manning it here. I can feel it. I can tell.
Chris: There's something about it that just makes me want to lean into it.
Wes: I am probably required at this point just to note you could also do that dream
Wes: you described using a, you know, Bootsy OCI system to push out stuff.
Chris: Well, yeah. Yeah, but still, it all comes back to having something in like a central repository.
Wes: Yeah, true.
Chris: It does. It's just right now it lives in my home directory. Thank you everybody
Chris: who emailed us this week, linuxunplugged.com slash contact if you'd like to send us an email.
Chris: And we did get some boost to support this show, which is direct support from
Chris: our audience. And we start with our baller booster this week.
Chris: And it's a baller indeed. A-A-Ron comes in with 100,000 sets.
Chris: All right. Thank you very much. That's a fantastic boost.
Chris: Made our day when we saw that one come in. Aaron writes, I believe Home Assistant
Chris: has a built-in migration tool for the Zigbee coordinators to make it easy to upgrade.
Chris: Since you'll have to buy a coordinator if you get new hardware anyway,
Chris: maybe get the coordinator first, then migrate to the new coordinator using your
Chris: HA Yellow, then theoretically all you would need to do is plug it into the new hardware.
Chris: Not so sure about Z-Wave or Matter, but I bet they would be similar.
Chris: Anyway, it's been a while since I boosted, so here's a little extra show,
Chris: some love. Sad to see self-hosted go, but happy to have some of those memories.
Chris: Stay savvy. P.S. What would it take to get my own soundbite? Well, I think...
Chris: I think you got it, buddy. I think you got it. That one got you too,
Chris: my friend. That one got you too. You keep boosting, we'll keep them on the soundboard.
Chris: Thank you so much for that idea. That's totally how I'm going to do it.
Wes: Yeah, that sounds like a great way.
Chris: That's totally how I'm going to do my migration, Aaron. I really appreciate
Chris: that. Thank you very much for the boost.
Wes: Turd Ferguson boosts in with 22,222 cents.
Wes: Ooh, a bit off topic here. On again, off again, Star Trek fan, but I know y'all go deep.
Wes: What are your thoughts on the new Star Trek Academy series?
Chris: It's never off topic, Wes, although we'll try to keep it brief for those that
Chris: don't care. I would sum it up as a Star Trek series nobody asked for.
Wes: Brutal but right I think.
Chris: But I think if you enjoyed Discovery you're probably going to enjoy this same universe it sure looks.
Wes: Similar from the like.
Chris: You know the production we're going to watch it oh yeah we're going to watch it which Star.
Wes: Trek have you not watched section 31.
Chris: Yeah if we watch section 31 we're going to watch Academy right it's going to happen so I.
Wes: Don't know if anyone else wants to boost it.
Chris: Thank you turd appreciate the boost Well.
Brent: Derivation dingus comes in with 20,000 sets.
Brent: Well, I almost tried Nebula, but I actually just converted all my stuff from
Brent: WireGuard to a self-hosted NetBird.
Brent: If you guys had consulted with me first, I'd have probably chosen Nebula,
Brent: but at least it'll be interesting to compare the two.
Brent: With WireGuard, I kept ending up in situations where DNS alone couldn't quite do everything I needed.
Brent: NetBird redirects DNS queries to itself, which allows it to respond to your
Brent: private network or for them to the local DNS provider.
Brent: and that means I can refer to my stuff by name and it doesn't break the software
Brent: on my work PC. What a time to be alive.
Chris: Woo!
Brent: I really like it so far. It's much better than handling as many WireGuard keys as I was previously.
Brent: Does Nebula do something similar to NetBird with DNS?
Chris: I wonder, Wes, could you do what I do with my TailScale network is I run now
Chris: a DNS server in my TailNet.
Chris: Could I, like, on one of my lighthouses, just run a DNS server?
Wes: Hey thanks for telling us about your setup uh self-hosted netbird
Wes: is a great option as well for sure the nebula dns
Wes: is newer and does not do as fancy stuff so like netbird acts as the dns and
Wes: then can kind of redirect things nebula only responds right now to things for
Wes: that it knows about so it works better in the situation you're describing where
Wes: you have a an upstream dns that can delegate and return responses you know that
Wes: it learns about a proxy from nebula having.
Chris: Tried both systems, I prefer one where I have slightly more control.
Wes: I do kind of end up running a DNS server like that anyway, so it's nice when
Wes: it's incorporated. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. But I love hearing about people's setups, so keep sending them in.
Chris: And thanks, derivation. It's good to hear from you.
Chris: Fuzzy Mistboard is here with 4,444 SATs.
Chris: This is a great episode. I enjoyed the self-hosted discussion and some interesting mini hardware.
Chris: I just made the switch to LinkWard in about a week before you found it.
Chris: And by the way, it's great. I've pulled all the Z-Wave and Zigbee manuals for
Chris: my devices as well as manuals for my motherboards.
Chris: Oh, that's such a great idea. And all the other hardware I want to preserve.
Chris: LinkWard made it super easy to pull them in, tag, and organize.
Wes: Okay, that's an excellent experience report. I haven't set it up yet,
Wes: but it's really somewhere on that to-do list.
Chris: Why did I not think of this? Like, literally, so my wife just got a juicer.
Chris: And I'm like, well, what do we do with these manuals? I can probably find PDFs, but do I keep them?
Chris: And she's like, well, I really only want the recipe book. You know,
Chris: it's like a system that just is designed to pull in PDFs and organize and tag them.
Chris: That's what I need. That's great, Fuzzy. Thank you.
Chris: I got to really get it going for her.
Wes: Outdoor Geek boosts in with 5,000 sets.
Wes: this zigbee dongle linked contains the same soc as the ha yellow oh sonoff zigbee 3.0 usb dongle.
Chris: Well well well at 17 you guys are coming through thank you.
Wes: For migration i would make sure the firmware versions match firmware can be
Wes: flashed i bought this dongle a year ago but only just plugged it into my Pi 4 home assistant.
Wes: I've seen some chatter about bad knockoffs, so try and buy from a reputable source.
Chris: Outdoor geek, that's very, very valuable. Thank you.
Brent: We have some more boosts here. One from MG1010104444s.
Brent: A couple here just saying setting up AlbiHub.
Chris: Hey, right on. That's the self-hosted route to go.
Chris: AlbiHub just had a new release, and it is even easier to manage than ever now.
Chris: If you want to dip your toes, it's a technical deep dive that I think you'll find very rewarding.
Chris: Well done, MG. Thanks for the boost.
Chris: Not a zip code comes in with 4,321 sats.
Chris: That's right. On the little red dot, just the zip code tells you where to go, just on the little dot.
Chris: So I'm not boosting a zip code, but nonetheless, looking forward to episode
Chris: 700 to see how many local listeners we have.
Chris: Or if you're in Singapore, please boost in.
Wes: Okay, so this is a response to our not a zip code from last week.
Chris: I think I said Singapore.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I think I did.
Wes: Somehow, I guess we got it right. Because this was where it was like per building,
Wes: right? The code told you the building?
Chris: Yes. I've been wanting to visit Singapore for some reason. I don't know.
Chris: I have a buddy who went there and just raved about it.
Chris: And now ever since, it was like two years ago, ever since I've been.
Wes: Singapore meetup.
Chris: Oh, my gosh. Also, we should have a hell of a party for 700.
Chris: 700. We should have a hell of a party.
Brent: Someone do the math of when that lands.
Chris: Oof. Thanks. Appreciate that. Not a zip.
Wes: Caffeinated Linux comes in with 4,242 sats, 4242.
Wes: Boosting in with my immutable experience, I've been using Fedora Silverblue
Wes: on everything but my main workstation for a few years now. It's been a great experience.
Wes: Smooth updates, Flatpak apps work great, and I only have a few packages overlaid for some drivers.
Wes: I was even able to rebase a spare laptop from Silverblue to Cosmic Atomic using
Wes: one command and after a reboot i was ready to go in cosmic love the show keep
Wes: up the great work p.s uh all 4242 sats earned by listening on fountain.
Chris: Very nice it's impressive um i also have rebased a couple of times i've rebased
Chris: three times now and it's worked great i really love that it's a it's something
Chris: that's just so slick about this experience and it's it makes distro hopping seem old.
Chris: Because you can rebase to an entire plasma system, cosmic system,
Chris: gnome system, but your user data and your applications and everything the way
Chris: you have that configured remains.
Wes: No reinstall or super careful partitioning or anything like that.
Brent: Well, a dude who's just trying stuff tried to send us a row of ducks and succeeded.
Brent: Yes, this is the Homelab content we were promised.
Brent: I'm one of those who dearly missed the self-hosted show, and I'm glad it is
Brent: living on through nods to self-hosting in Linux Unplugged. Keep being awesome, lads.
Chris: Well, thank you.
Brent: P.S. I'd love if more of the picks were useful. Self-hosted apps.
Chris: The way you said that.
Wes: Quit with the two-y crap and give us self-hosted picks.
Chris: Yeah, just the way you said that. It would be great if they're useful.
Brent: We only do un-useful self-hosted apps.
Chris: Okay, so I don't have a bunch of self-hosted ones, but I do think they're going
Chris: to be useful. But I agree.
Chris: More and more, I've been like, well, you know, we don't need a whole segment
Chris: on this, but we'll definitely put this in the pick. And a lot of them are some
Chris: of the self-hosted pick stuff.
Wes: Yeah, that's a good idea.
Chris: That community, it kind of blooms lots of good stuff, and then it kind of goes
Chris: quiet for a little bit, and then lots of new stuff blooms. So it's really fun to watch.
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who supported the show. Aaron, you did a heavy lift this week.
Chris: Thank you very much. And thank you, everybody, who streamed.
Chris: We had 24 of you stream as you listen, stacking 18,439 sats collectively.
Chris: Not our biggest number there, but I appreciate that. When you combine that with
Chris: our boost, the show eked out 185,545 sats.
Chris: Those go directly to the host, to editor Drew, and to the podcast creator and the podcast index.
Chris: The splits are defined in the RSS feed, so you can essentially see the contract
Chris: in XML, and it goes directly to everybody involved. It's just a great way to
Chris: support each individual production and get your message on here.
Chris: Fountain.fm makes it really easy to get started, and they're about to release
Chris: a banger of an update that'll include ways to boost even easier around the world.
Chris: But of course, you can go the self-hosted route with AlbiHub or skip all of
Chris: that by becoming a member and putting your support on autopilot.
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash membership for this show or jupiter.party for the whole network.
Chris: Now we do have some of those picks to get to before we get out of here.
Chris: And this first one is Tony.
Chris: Tooney? I don't know.
Wes: I don't know. Tony?
Chris: Damn it. I hate that we have to do this so often.
Brent: Go with Tooney. Come on.
Chris: It's not this hard in the commercial world. It really isn't.
Chris: because marketing forces them to use words people know.
Chris: But it's a fast, lightweight terminal, note-taking app.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. How about...
Wes: Sleek TUI interface built with Bubble T and Go, which is a great library for this kind of thing.
Wes: Markdown rendering right there, file navigation, and native NeoVim editing right in your terminal.
Chris: Pretty nice, Wes. Pretty nice. And then on the other side of the spectrum, oh, MIT licensed.
Chris: On the other side of the spectrum, we have something built around Etsy Sync.
Chris: This may ring a bell. It was recently, semi-recently open sourced.
Chris: It's interesting encrypted synchronization technology.
Chris: And Etsy Sync KNotes is built on top of that encrypted syncing technology.
Chris: And the Notes application uses a connection to one of your Etsy Sync accounts.
Chris: It can be self-hosted or one of their hosted ones. And you can create notes,
Chris: edit notes, search across your notes, sort the notes, display notes,
Chris: all the things you expect with Notes.
Chris: But the nice feature is it's actually an application taking advantage of Etsy
Chris: Sync. and if that's something you've been following or interested to see somebody
Chris: develop software around, we're actually starting to see it now.
Chris: That was the big thing I was waiting to see. I mean, there's a couple of core
Chris: applications they already have and they're really cool, but this Notes app,
Chris: it's lean, it's mean, but it's taking advantage of this pretty powerful sync technology.
Brent: I feel like sometimes with the picks, we can tell maybe some themes on what
Brent: is happening behind the scenes at JB.
Brent: So are one of you looking for a new Notes app? Is that what's going on here?
Chris: I'm thinking about it. I'm still living the Obsidian lifestyle,
Chris: but I find that what I tend to do is find a leaner, meaner app to just create
Chris: my notes, and then later on I sit down and copy and paste it into Obsidian, and it's got to go.
Brent: You know that's wild, right? Why would you ever do that?
Chris: It's got to go.
Wes: So you need a plug-in that auto-imports your...
Chris: There you go. There you go. Yeah. If anybody has some suggestions for something
Chris: that works on desktop, mobile, iOS, Android, and syncs,
Chris: i mean and i did not evernote not obsidian you know that's why i was looking
Chris: at etsy sync i don't think it's there for me obsidian is a hard one to replace
Chris: you know because those community plugins i love those sweet sweet community plugins can.
Brent: You remind us what it is about obsidian that has you looking elsewhere.
Chris: Well i think i'm parted so i pay so much per year for the sync and then it feels
Chris: kind of like a heavy application so i don't load it very much,
Chris: if i didn't use any ios devices it'd be fine but
Chris: when i'm working on the car i like to use the ipad for taking notes
Chris: but then when i don't have the ipad i end up using like the garage computer
Chris: or my phone and i just like open up a text editor and just take the notes on
Chris: my phone it's just it's just not working for me something has to be on the phone
Chris: i you know i don't know and i've tried next cloud notes too maybe it's me i think the problem is me,
Chris: I'm not quite willing to give up yet, you know? And I can't just give in to, what is it that you love?
Wes: Logseek.
Chris: Yeah, Logseek.
Wes: I think I have a new beta mobile app, actually, I need to try.
Chris: Yeah, you and your... I said to overstruggle, meanwhile, you're just over there
Chris: loving your Logseek. Drives me crazy.
Wes: I'm not going to say it's perfect, but I do like it.
Chris: And Brent's just using pen and paper, right?
Brent: It's strapped to my leg.
Wes: Yeah, but he makes the paper himself.
Chris: He does.
Brent: From Canadian trees.
Chris: Oh, I thought it was toilet paper.
Brent: Oh, okay. Canadian toilet paper.
Chris: All right, well, let us know what you thought about the FlatHub-only desktop
Chris: app future, and particularly for you.
Chris: What tools, what workflow would break for you?
Chris: And if app packaging did stop being a differentiator for distributions,
Chris: what would make you pick?
Chris: Fedora over Debian, or whatever the district might be, say, in a few years,
Chris: if this future were to materialize.
Wes: And why is it Arch Linux?
Chris: Wes, leave him with a hot tip before we go. Give him a little more you know.
Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, you might not know, but you should. We're a podcasting 2.0 podcast,
Wes: which means we have chapters so you can skip right to the content you like and
Wes: transcripts. Search it.
Wes: Use it to display. Follow along. Skip even finer detail.
Chris: Yeah, we try to link everything we mentioned, but maybe we mentioned something
Chris: we didn't link. You can probably get the name of it or close to it in that transcript.
Chris: That can be pretty useful.
Chris: See, a little listener pro tip for you right there at the end.
Chris: Also, one last pro tip. We're live.
Chris: Go ahead and make it a Tuesday on a Sunday over at jblive.tv or jblive.fm.
Chris: Kick it up a notch, grab yourself a beverage, and join our mumble room.
Chris: Our virtual lug gets together around 10 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: You can get it over at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar in your time and
Chris: our mumble server info that's over at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: Now, links to everything we talked about today, well we try to put all of that
Chris: at linuxunplugged.com slash 625.
Chris: You'll find other links like our contact form, the RSS feed,
Chris: a bunch of other things over there, like the membership as well over at the
Chris: linuxunplugged.com website.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.
Chris: We'll see you right back here next Sunday.
Wes: Uh breaking checking in from the past news someone just checked in from the
Wes: past yeah uh simulated snakes checked in via matrix checking in from the past
Wes: um we're not calling it the bang bus anymore are we.
Chris: Oh yes yes yes i love the time travel check-ins thank you everybody who continues
Chris: to do that just if you're listening in the past now you know weeks or months
Chris: after this episode came out try to check in in real time with us and let us
Chris: know where in the timeline you We'll be listening from the future.