LINUX Unplugged - 379: Favorite Linux Tweaks

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

We round up our favorite tweaks to the desktop, and apps that make it great. Plus some highlights from Arch Conf, and our reaction to Mint finally fixing their Chromium problem. Special Guest: Drew DeVore.

So we've been watching these videos on the pre-show before we actually started recording. The pre-pre-show. And I realized I just totally wrecked my YouTube algorithm. There's been this phenomenon where it seems like YouTube has certain types of videos they really want me to watch and other types of videos that they just completely forget. So the other day on YouTube TV at home, my wife brought up one of these like ASMR rainy cabin background kind of music videos. Now when we're going through YouTube, we have like three rows of these videos. Watch it one time. And there's three rows of these. Have you experienced this? Yes, I have. You almost need just a separate throwaway YouTube account just for browsing random interests and then the one you carefully prune. Isn't the

algorithm supposed to do this for us? Yeah. I feel like there's some big YouTube agenda, Wes. We've got to fight back against the machine. Big ASMR. Hello, friends, and welcome to episode 379 of your weekly Linux talk show. This episode is brought to you by CloudGuru, the leader in hands-on learning. The only way to learn a new skill is by doing. That's why ACG provides hands-on labs, cloud service, and much more. Get your hands cloudy at cloudguru.com. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And this is episode 379 of the People's Podcast. Really, let's talk about what this really is. This is a podcast for the people, and it's a special edition because right now we're joined by very special people. And let's start with Mr. Drew. Welcome back to the show, Drew. Oh, my God. It's been so long.

I missed you guys. I know. We missed you. Do you remember how to podcast? I think so. I guess we'll find out. I mean, yeah. This is the big test right now.

Live. We're doing this on a Sunday, which is unusual. Feels wrong. And Drew brought the vodka. So, you know, now that Drew's back, we're drinking. Drinking with Drew? And we're recording this a little bit early. We normally do it on a Tuesday, but we're doing it on Sunday this week, which means something else special.

There's a bunch of really great people in our virtual lug that are normally here for Sunday for Luplug, but now they're here for the show. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

I mean, it's a tighter crowd. I don't think we have nearly as many people watching live, but we have a handful. But they're vocal. And we have a great Mumble Room turnout turnout and some familiar friends and some new friends. Grim, welcome on to Linux Unplugged. I'm going to give away your secret. Grim is the Pidgin developer.

We all remember Pidgin, right? Some of us still use Pidgin. Sure do. Love it. And Grim's joining us for the first time. Hey, Grim, welcome back to the, or welcome to Linux Unplugged. Hi, thanks for having me. I finally was able to make one of these times, just randomly saw your tweets.

I was like, well, might as well show up. I'm glad you did. I say, I almost said welcome back because you and I have had conversations outside the show, but this is the first time you've been on the show. So I'm glad to have you here and welcome to a weird Sunday edition. And then also, Wes texts Jeff, who has been following the shows for a million years. He and I have shook hands dozens of times. I mean, we've met up in Texas several times.

He was at Linux Academy headquarters once, and we got to show him around a little bit. He's finally joined us on the Mumble Room for the first time, too. Welcome aboard. Hey, can you hear me? I've never tried this before. It works, man. You got it. You got it going.

Awesome. I'm glad you're here. I missed you, man. I can't wait till we start festing again. I know. Amen. I got one of those automatic, like you were doing this a year ago, photos. It was like a little more than a year ago, and it was Wes and I in Boston.

Those were the days. I was like, oh, yeah, that used to be a thing we did. It'll happen again. It will happen again. But in the meantime, a lot of people are shifting virtual for those events. And Arch is one of them, ArchConf 2020. And it's kind of a special one because this year marks 18 years since the first official release of ArchLabs. Wow, that is a long time. I know. And they organized this whole event using open source tools. We'll link to a bunch of their

talks. They released them online. But I went through and watched a few of them, and they talk about how they loosely organized on IRC, and then they used Etherpad, which is that nice collaboration tool. Yeah, they used Etherpad for a lot of the written organization. And then they held organization meetings over Jitsi or Mumble. Which is just so cool. Those are all great tools.

Yeah, those are all great tools to build an event like this. And it actually looks like ArchConf 2020 went pretty good for them. And they had multiple streams and they got lots of questions in. But you know me, Wes. I went and got us a couple of clips. Oh, you. I didn't even tell you about this. Sneaky clip.

I know. I snuck these in because I just thought it'd be fun to cover a couple things. So I got three clips, really quick ones. The first one here is from Greg KH, and it's just short and sweet. Greg KH is a happy, well, obviously Linus is number two kernel maintainer. He's a happy Arch Linux user, and so he pre-recorded a welcome message to the conference. Hi, this is Greg Crowe Hartman, and welcome to ArchConf 2020. As a longtime Arch Linux user,

I'm really happy to see this conference happen, even when we're all stuck at home. Thanks to all the Arch developers for maintaining such a great system that I rely on every day. Enjoy the conference. I don't know why, but it just tickles me that Greg's an Arch user.

Right? This is so great. And then Alan McRae, he did an early history of Arch talk. We'll have the full talk link because there's a lot of details, including some of the minor developments, some of the more significant political developments, like when Pac-Man came along, too, technical developments. Right. But I captured a bit for us. So in the beginning, there was Crux, and it was good.

Highlights being its simple package build scripts, simple configuration, utilities. But there was no dependency tracking. So the founder of Arch Linux, Judd, wrote Pac-Man, and it essentially spawned a distribution. So beginning in 2002, Pac-Man 1.1 was released, and then Arch Linux 0.1, codenamed Homer, was released not far after. Good quote from the release notes is, the bad news is that you don't get a pretty interactive installer. So some things have not changed. The big selling points at the time were the i686 optimization when most other distributions were using i386 and install once continuously update never have to reinstall policy, and it being simple.

Now, simple was defined in terms of the packaging and the tools for administrating the distribution, not in terms of being simple to use necessarily. Alan McRae is the developer, well, of a lot of Arch, actually. He maintains the tool chain that you use to build Arch, like binutils, the GCC packages, glibc, Linux API headers, all of its dependencies. I've never used any of those. No, no, never. Package config, you know, those kinds of things. Make. So he's got an interesting perspective. We will have a link to the entire video in there.

But then further in, there is discussion about the future of Arch. They talk about some of the culture changes that they think need to happen. And then they talk about some of the tech changes that they think probably should happen. And one that caught my attention is faster package turnaround using new automated technology. Let's talk about actual future improvements. One major thing I want to talk about, and this is also the first bullet point, is accolade delayed package updates. What I mean by that is timely package updates are our core value. We are a rolling distro and users expect that our packages are always up to date and we are rolling fast. This is really our core value.

Now, some of you may ask why we need to acclimate and what I mean by that. The only thing I mean by that is that right now we don't really have a central way of detecting upstream updates. So basically, it's a per-package-maintainer effort to somehow keep track of upstream sources. In some areas, it works great. In some areas, it actually doesn't work out that well. And sometimes it takes weeks or months and multiple releases until a user flags a package as out of date on ArchWeb. And then we finally roll an update because a package maintainer was not really aware maybe of that. And I don't think this is a people problem.

So we should not start yelling at people while we're not properly keeping track. But I think this is more like a tooling problem. We should solve it with technology. So I've been also lately playing around and playing with something we call ourselves SendCrawler. So this is also something I will raise in the future, having something technologically integrated in ArchWeb, which is able to automatically flag packages as out of date. And this will also accelerate at the end delayed package updates. One of our core responsibilities.

Core responsibility, core value. You hear that over and over again there. I think that's interesting. And then also that they want to address this as a technology problem, not a people problem. Yeah, I like that approach. If we can just automate this, that means there won't be continued people failures. And I think all of us know that

oftentimes these projects update a lot, or maybe they don't update for years and then suddenly update. And if you maintain more than a handful of packages, that's a lot to keep up with. There's also talks on Linux memory management at scale, GamerOS, which is an Arch Linux-based gaming OS.

There is a talk about Matrix and how to host your Matrix server on Arch. That's pretty cool. Packaging Rust applications, rolling your own security team for fun and profit. Not at all, it says. There's a lot of good ones on here.

Oh, oh, one that I'm absolutely going to go back and watch that I missed is the Arch Linux team Q&A. I'm really impressed. They pulled off a really good live event, and the videos got turned around pretty dang quick. Yeah, I'm impressed with that, especially if you haven't done this before. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, and in this case, a lot of things that went right.

When we talk about firmwares, a lot of times you'll hear people talking about the effort to free the Intel firmware from the management engine and a lot of the stuff around Intel CPUs. But the conversation hasn't really covered the AMD CPU side too much. And not only are the Ryzen chips just totally dominating performance, but they seem to be of a lot of interest to Linux users. So, Ferotics has an article about Project X, which apparently is someone at Google, Rob Minich. Ron Minich? Minich, yeah. Coreboot and Linux BIOS in the past, has engaged in this Project X, which is trying to

provide a pure open source support environment on AMD's Zen platforms. Yeah, Project X is about excising, hey, that's the X, excising binary blobs from the x86 part of Zen CPUs. Huh. This open

source AMD Zen support is being worked on both for Coreboot and the downstream or boot that's written in Rust. I'm sorry, what did you say? Because I didn't catch that, Wes. Did you say it was written in Rust? It's not really all just about that, though. At OSFC 2020, there were some talks going on about the open source AMD support, and that's where we got some of this information.

AMD's system management architect also said that they'll be talking about the company's work on their open source BMC firmware support for their platforms as well. Huh. Yeah, that's the baseboard management controller. So, you know, folks like Facebook and others using OpenBMC to run their big fancy racks and servers. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And we have a link to that. It takes place, oh, it hasn't taken place yet.

No, open source firmware conference coming up at the start of December, 1st through the 3rd, 2020. So we will be getting more information, you're telling me? Indeed. Oh, well, you more information, you're telling me? Indeed. Oh, well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to keep an earball out for information that we can clip. If there's something in there about, I mean, whoa, I mean, whoa. Think about it here just for a hot second. A future where you have a totally, totally open Ryzen system

with drivers built into your kernel. Right? I mean, when you think about it, too, there was so long Ryzen system with drivers built into your kernel. Right? I mean, when you think about it, too, there was so long where there just didn't seem like much hope going on in the core boot area. And recently, there's been a lot more momentum. So I'm excited to see this, and I'm really excited to learn more once these talks are out.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get a $100 60-day credit towards a new account. Linode is our server provider. That's where we deploy our systems whenever we have something from back-end infrastructure to a tool to something we want to try out for the show, we're always using Linode. I just recently was experimenting with setting up a new VPN server for myself because I'm messing around with bonding LTE connections. I was actually talking to Wes about this too.

I'm messing around with bonding LTE connections. I was actually talking to Wes about this too. And there's a really, really comprehensive set of documentation I discovered on Linode. And they are completely okay with giving me information on how to replace the image on a Linode with my own custom distribution. I followed their official documentation on how to reflash a Linode to my own custom Linux OS for this. Isn't that something? I think it really shows they've been around, too.

They didn't just make the top 10 features you need to be a hosting provider. They've been in the game a long time, and they know what actual power tools users like you might need. Well, they're Linux users themselves. And so unlike entry-level hosting services that will just lock you into this box, Linode gives you a full back-end access to anything you want to customize, anything you need to control your server. And they also give you that same level of access to things like DNS. They have S3 compatible object storage.

They have node balancers. They started, like Wes was saying, a long time ago in 2003 as one of the first companies in cloud computing. I've followed them for a long time. They often go to a lot of the same events that I go to. So I've seen them at Linux Fest. And they've been a sponsor of a lot of open source projects. So of course I've known about them,

but about two years ago, I started using them very seriously. And really, just as of a few months ago, I've gone all in for my business too, because I really trust what Linode does here. They're an independently owned company. They've been around

for a really long time and they're not going anywhere. They got 11 data centers worldwide. It's really easy to get started. It's only $5 a month, but you could play with a lot more like the object storage. Maybe you want to make a super fast website for yourself for a resume or portfolio, or maybe just a blog. $5 a month gets you started. But when you go to linode.com slash unplugged, you get a $100 credit. You could really experiment. You could really test it and really see what I'm talking about. Also, keep an

eye out for Linode's new Linux Security series with Hackersploit. All the episodes are available on demand, and they go into detail on a lot of the basics around Linux Security you need to know for either on-premises hosting or for a Linode system. It's like just good fundamentals.

And it's something they worked with. Hackersploit is an individual who's well-known on YouTube. He covers a lot of – his name is Alexis. He covers a lot of security stuff. And he's done an SSH security essentials, securing Apache, securing Nginx, a complete guide to UFW, how to work with sudo and maybe some of the more advanced things you can do with sudo. He's done guides for all of that. And you can check that out on Linode's blog. That's something worth just checking out

because it's good to know just how to do this stuff and implement it correctly. But you can learn all of this with $100 credit. This is a great opportunity to learn too. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there, get that $100 60-day credit, and you support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged.

Do you remember when we talked about Linux Mint breaking the Chromium Snap? Just the whole experience was real bad for the end user. Somehow that was actually last June, June 30th or so, episode 360 of this year program. Explain the logic to me here, Drew, because to me it seems like this is something they should have fixed before they broke it in the first place. And I know I could sit here and I could give them accolades for building their own version of Chromium

and packaging it up and bundling in the IPTV player, but from where I sit, it seems like this should have been done, maybe, you know, the old saying, you fix the barn door before the horses come home and not after. You're right. I was not on board with their decision to just

completely rip out snaps and make it devilishly hard to get them running again if you needed stuff that was snapped. I thought it was a bad decision. I still think it was a bad decision. And this is a little bit too little too late. I do like what the Mint team does in general, but that was not their finest hour. Now, I know you're a big Mint user there, Wes. I know you use it on all your system. You've used it for years. I run it right now on your laptop.

You know, actually, I have used it a fair amount. I think it's still running on at least one of my family's computers. And most recently, actually since June and since we played around a little bit with the 20 release, I was using it as a gaming PC just to try things out. Really? Yeah. So I have been using it. Okay.

I did find it interesting. They have had to allocate some resources here. Yeah. So they weren't doing no work. Like they write that they've set up a new Ryzen 9 3900 CPU setup, 128 gigs of RAM and NVMe disks just to get the build times under an hour. So not trivial. And they do thank folks for their patience,

so I think they acknowledge, too, that it's probably been longer than anyone would like. Yeah, okay. I mean, what's all this hoopla around this IPTV player where people are saying they're wasting resources on that, too? What's the deal with that? I think it's just a little odd. Folks thought, you know, Clem taking time out to work on this IPTV player

and sort of talk about it in a casual way where it's not clear if it's really going to get continued or if it'll be included in Mint. No problems with it existing, but it felt like a weird part to be part of the monthly Mint update. Don't let this happen to you. I think you just became our Mint correspondent, you know, because you're a big

Mint user, so I don't I shouldn't poke fun because I know people that use it and they love it, and I actually really respect what Clem and his team do, so I need to make that disclosure. But sometimes I just kind of have a little fun at it, because this was a problem that didn't need to happen. You could have even punted this action for one release while you worked on this

and then rolled in your solution to the next release and just eat the snapped version for one release but it felt like emotions got involved here. It was a reaction without much planning. But I have to say I'm not receiving the feedback Clam and his team are receiving

maybe their users have messaged to him very clearly they don't want snaps. It's not outside the realm of possibility. We had that chat with the Uno platform last week, and they released this tool to take Windows applications and build native versions for Linux, and the number one feedback they got from the Linux community

was, don't use snap. Isn't that something? And so it is possible that the Mint team was just receiving a lot of feedback saying, don't use snap. Isn't that something? And so it is possible that the Mint team was just receiving a lot of feedback saying, don't use snap. Snap, snap back. And I, you know, this is, this is, it's an interesting realization

of what we think is just a squeaky wheel minority, but it turns out to have real world ramifications. So you've got this larger and larger group of probably more sophisticated Linux users that don't like snap packages for various reasons, and they seem to advocate and try to persuade companies that are developing and deploying Snaps to use other packaging formats. And you could see how a company like Adobe comes along

and say they want to Snap up Photoshop, and they release Photoshop, and they get several thousand people telling them, hey, idiots, don't use this. Use App Image. Don't use this. Use Flatpak. Each company is going to receive that feedback differently, and they're going to process that differently. And do they have developers on staff there or folks in management who understand the Linux ecosystem? Yeah, maybe. I have to be frank with you. I don't see any indication from Canonical that they recognize that this is an issue and that they're even beginning to address it.

I think they have written it off as, well, the people that always told us Launchpad needs to be open source, the people that always were giving us a hard time for Upstart, the people who hated Unity. Now look at all these people using Unity. I think this, over the years, this mentality has developed where they just have

created a thick skin and they don't listen to all these detractors. Well, I think they also don't necessarily feel like they're designing Snap. They make Snap for the Linux desktop users who don't know what package managers are. And so there's sort of like just two different cabs not talking to each other. Right. The issue is, I can tell you that I have been told in confidence, and there's other

instances which I can point to publicly, but I have been told more so in confidence that it is a item of feedback that the companies are struggling with. Like, you know how this works. For anybody that works in a business that puts anything out publicly, negative feedback gets a lot of attention. It gets, you know, it gets in the Slack thread and people are discussing it and then the boss sees it and he's got to get somebody on it to address it. It becomes this snowball. And I am telling you, I have heard from multiple developers in confidence and I've heard from some developers on the record that this is an issue for them when they package their application as snaps. And the problem is, is that snaps are very attractive from a corporate standpoint. You're a business and you can have a relationship with Canonical.

You can do a business to business relationship and you can distribute your application and package it in a single outlet that is very simple to install on almost all the major distributions out there. It's extremely attractive from a developer standpoint. And I actually can, I can appreciate the value that canonical brings to this process, but the people who are flat packer app images advocates, they couldn't care less about the business to business relationship. They could give two craps about it. So they, and it really has shown me with these conversations that I've had and with the conversation we had last week with the Uno platform and what we were just talking about with Mint, it seems that using snaps has become a liability. And I don't think Canonical is addressing it. I don't think they are fully appreciating the scope of it. And the worst part is I think they're probably about eight

months too late in addressing it. And the momentum is there now I think they're probably about eight months too late in addressing it, and the momentum is there now. And there's really nothing they can do about it at this point. And it is unfortunate because what I see developing here, and I don't have any pleasure in saying this because I'm personal friends with Popey and Wimpy, and I don't like saying this, but I have to be honest with you. What I see developing here is a Betamax situation where there is a lot of technological advantages to a snap. There's a lot of business advantages to a snap. There's a distribution advantage to a snap. There's a lot of upsides, but it still isn't the one that wins out. And I think Canonical is too late to address it. And I wish I could share with you some of the

stories that I have heard via email from developers. So you're just going to have to take my word for it. I have no motivation to say this otherwise. And I don't feel like it's being addressed. And here we see Mint now. And I've come on the air and I've said they're wrong for doing it this way. But for all I know, because I haven't heard from that team, they don't communicate with the media. For all I know, they have gotten pushback from their user base. And that's why they've taken this action. But either way, they seem to be on the way of fixing and addressing it. But like you said, I think it's too little too late. I think you're right in a lot of ways. But one thing that I really see is a parallel

to the way that Pulse Audio rolled out. It wasn't ready, and people started shipping it. In the same vein, Snap I still don't think is quite ready. And Ubuntu is shipping it by default and even pushing people towards using it for things like Chromium and other software that sometimes they can only get as a Snap. And the unfortunate thing here is it's going to be the same thing that we saw with Pulse Audio, where people were like, oh, I hate this. It doesn't work right. And even though it's, you be the same thing that we saw with Pulse Audio, where people were like, oh, I hate this. It doesn't work right.

And even though it's 10 years later and Pulse Audio works great, people still have that same bitter taste from when they first used it and it wasn't perfect. So even if Ubuntu and Canonical fixes it tomorrow, you're right. It's eight months too late. They pushed it too soon. And we're never going to quite get that feeling out where people just don't like it because they had a bad experience before. And there's also the central App Store aspect that seems to be unappealing. Yeah, I mean,

there's lots of stuff to talk about there about why it's not perfect. And it could have been so good. You know, like they could have taken a few cues from Flatpak. They could have done it their way and really tweaked out the bugs to where fonts worked correctly, where they don't take forever to load, all of that before actually starting pushing it into the operating system itself. But, yeah, that's fair. I can see part of what you're saying there. I don't know if the font stuff and the theme stuff, I mean, it definitely registers for us,

but in, you know, average user deployments, corporate deployments, educational deployments, I think they're pretty used to applications just looking like crap. I don't think that was an issue. I think it just came down to two problems. And they're on the way to fix one of them. Problem number one is load time. Problem number two is the centralized app store. And that's where AppImage and Flatpak are considered superior by some.

I will note, it doesn't seem to be by developers generally. It is by end users who prefer to consume the application in the way they like and deploy it. Or it is projects who want to host their own repositories like elementary OS. But application start time may be on the path to getting fixed. My understanding is that future snaps may be using LZO compression, which means the snap file sizes themselves will be larger.

But the opening time and the CPU load required to open those snaps will be reduced. Faster to actually get the application up into memory and started. Yeah. So that could be good, but would have been, I don't know, it's just it's a hard technical challenge. So easy for me to say, but would have been good,

like I was saying, eight, nine months ago at the beginning of 2020, not towards the end of 2020. And I worry that the reputational damage is done, not in terms of what businesses or developers

will perceive, like companies like Adobe, who may be someday looking to actually launch applications on Linux. I don't think these issues are going to surface for them. The way it will surface for them, based on the feedback and the conversations I've been having, is once they launch, they get this tidal wave of negative feedback about how they've chosen to package. And it kind of sucks for Canonical because in some cases, Canonical nursemaids these companies in the Linux community. They're playing the role of host

and they're kind of introducing them on how to target for Linux, what to say, how to message, how to work with Linux. Like, please help here. We'll help you make these amps for Linux. And then you just get bit when you step in the pool. Yeah, and then they release and everybody's like,

no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't like snaps. And then that company is forced to kind of distance themselves from that. And Canonical has invested all this time in getting the application actually over to Linux with them. And so it's kind of a lose-lose situation for both Canonical and for the developer. And I just feel like there has to be something that could be done there, or it's just simply not going to get addressed,

and it is what it is. But it is something that I've been watching and kind of, as the year develops, getting a little concerned about, because I think it has a lot of nice advantages, especially on the server side, and especially for developers. But for that, we'll just have to wait and see how things develop.

You know, moving right along. So I wanted to get everyone's take on Starlink. I'm getting kind of excited about it here because it is in open beta in the Pacific Northwest. If you're in Washington State and a few other areas around us, you can actually get in on the Starlink beta. And when technologies like this start to roll around, one of the first things I wonder about is

what's the Linux support story going to be? I'm sure Starlink runs this whole thing on Linux, right? I'm sure SpaceX is deploying these things running Linux. Satellites are running Linux. The systems that are launching it are running Linux. Seems like a darn good bet, at least from what we know. Yeah. But the question is, where will we be in terms of support for Linux

as end users on the Starlink network? And it looks like some of the early data from the beta testers is pretty positive. I mean, you got to remember this is beta, so it's not even final grade production here, but people are getting pretty good ping times, you know, in the 20s to 40s milliseconds. They're getting pretty good bandwidth, much better than you'd get on an average cellular connection.

In some cases, 160 megabits. In other cases, you know, more like 40 megabits. It all kind of depends, it seems. It's getting really close. And I just kind of wanted to take the temperature of the room and ask people what they think about, because I'm obviously looking forward to it as a way to kind of expand my remote connectivity. Yeah, you're only a little excited. But I think remote users, like mobile users like myself, are going to be one of the later users that they get to. Colonel, I know you and I have talked about this a little bit during the LUP plug.

What are your current thoughts on it? I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens as they roll it out of beta because I know for certain types of cellular technologies, when they initially set it up as a beta network, everything worked great. Once they got the load on the network, things were still working, but not as good as in beta. So I think it'll be interesting to see

what happens when it becomes a nationwide, as well as when it becomes a more common place thing for people to be using, and how they handle that load as well as what are the privacy implications of this because i mean it is a sat network so unlike a traditional sat network which broadcasts to a large area on the ground my understanding with starlink is that it's a lot of small satellites broadcasting to smaller areas. So is there any kind of tracking involved, just like there is with cell phones? Are they going to do any kind of

blocks like some home ISPs do? It's also going to be interesting to see, especially because a lot of people are going to be looking at this for RV usage, what kind of power usage does the receiver use? And so I think there's a lot of questions that we won't really know until it either gets out of beta or becomes much more widely adopted. I think that the biggest insights we've gotten so far is an article over on Ars Technica. They worked with an individual known as Wandering Coder. So he's already speaking to me. Interesting. And he tested it out in a few locations,

including some heavily covered tree areas and some that were more open to the sky. And at one point, he got 120 megabits download and an upload of 12 megabits with an average latency of 37 milliseconds. That's fantastic for satellite internet. That is absolutely fantastic. And he did move his item around for these tests.

The beta for Starlink right now strongly encourages you to only use it at the registered location. So that's why I say I think maybe it'll be a little bit until individuals like myself are using it on their buses. Right. I mean, you know, these are lower than, you know, lower satellites that are constantly moving and switching. So if you already have to keep track of that and you're driving your RV around, that's a lot of moving parts. But here's a little comparison. So in some of the tests that they talked about here on Ars Technica, they were getting like an average, when you look at it,

maybe like a 42 milliseconds, let's say, latency. 42 milliseconds latency is not as good as you're going to get on a nice high-speed home broadband connection. But compared to Vistastat or Viestat or HughesNet, you're looking at like a 600 millisecond difference. HughesNet is in the same testing area, has a latency of 728 millisecond, and Viestat has 643 milliseconds. I think that's the biggest win. I mean, Starlink may also be faster in terms of throughput, but you can get some decent throughput if the latency is a problem

on some existing satellite providers. But just because Starlink is so much closer to you, right, orbiting just closer to the Earth, latency is a huge win. I could see businesses using this as a backup connection too. Maybe they have their faster gigabit broadband. You know, they have fiber, but it goes out. Like you had internet issues this weekend. I did. And if you were, you know, if we were doing some sort of live television production and you were in a home studio,

it may be worth your money to have a backup like that. Oh, I like it. A second backup. I've got LTE. I've got Starlink. And hey, don't forget, you know, Amazon's getting in this game too. So I think there'll be some competitors to Starlink that we'll have to take into account too. Whatever happened to those Google balloons? I think, did they bail on that? I can't remember. Or Facebook had a project too. But I could see a future where LTE and 5G cover a lot of nomadic digital workers.

And then when you settle down in a spot for a day or so, you can turn on Starlink and you get, hopefully, an unlimited higher speed connection. I think for that, you know, the people who haven't already been served by fast broadband internet, it's going to be huge for them. Yeah. Hey, let's do a little housekeeping. If you haven't yet, you should consider joining the LUP Lug every Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern in our Mumble room. You can get information on how to set up Mumble. Just go to linuxunplug.com slash mumble. We have a really brief guide there as well as an extended guide.

The thing is, you never know when we're going to show up. This Sunday, we just kind of popped in and said, hey, guys, we have a show to do. Can you join us? And now the LUP plug is here doing the show on a Sunday. And we're going to do it next Sunday, too. What? Yeah, I haven't told anybody yet, but I'm going to be out and about that Tuesday,

and the timing's going to be really tight. So we're going to record next week's Linux Unplugged on Sunday as well. So join us, and you can start out in the virtual LUP because we come in a little bit later, so there's still some lug time. But on November 15th, we'll do the show live over at jblive.tv, noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

And then the Sunday after that, November 22nd in the lup lug, it's the Bugathon for Jellyfin 10.7. Oh, now that's a reason to join. Yeah, and you can help test Jellyfin and make it the best release ever with the virtual lug. So that's all happening in the mumble room, plus it's that same mumble configuration to join the show

if you ever get the chance, and then you're just good to go. I also want to mention that Jupiter Broadcasting has an all-shows feed where you can subscribe to that and you just get every show we put out. Oh, that's like every show? Yeah, did you know Coda Radio's back? What? That's right.

Linux Action News now features a brand new co-host, a sharp young fella named Wes Payne. Hey, that's me. That's you. All that and this show and more, like self-hosted in the All Shows feed, plus anything new we come up with. So consider that if you haven't already subscribed to the Jupiter Broadcasting All Shows feed.

You just search for it in your podcatcher of choice or find a link at jupiterbroadcasting.com and that, Wes Payne, is all of the housekeeping. We wanted to talk about our favorite Linux desktop tweaks which is going to include apps and command line tools.

Things that we use or deploy or leverage or take advantage of or, come on, one more. What's one more? Leverage. I already said leverage. Come on. Give me a good one.

Deploy. Nope, I said deploy. Utilize. Yeah, utilize. You got it, Wes. Good job. Good. I thought we weren't going to get that.

First thing on the list, command line dictionary. Yeah, we should have. Yeah, so these are just different things that we've collected over the years, some of which we've told you about on past shows, some of which are brand new. So I'll start with a couple here, one that I have absolutely talked about before on the show, but is such a game changer that I continue to use it day to day on every distribution that I set up. And I think you should try it if you haven't yet, unless you don't like speed. Unless maybe you prefer your web browser to be slow.

But if you like your web browser fast, check out Profile Sync Daemon. It's essentially just symlinks your browser profile into a RAM disk, but it handles the synchronization from the RAM disk back to your actual profile on your disk for you. And it makes the browser so much faster. It never has to wait for your disk. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Chris, I have me one of these fast PCIe MVME disks, man. It gets like one of them gigabits a second. It's real nice. It's got the gigabytes. I do too. And I'm telling you, it's still faster when you use Profile Sync Daemon. It's great.

It makes the UI more responsive. It's because like, you know, you're hitting like your bookmarks menu. It's got to check the disk. It just loads instant fricking taneously. And it makes web pages work better. It makes everything faster. And if you got more than 16 gigs of RAM in your system, you got enough to like polish off a few hundred megabytes for this thing. and if you got more than 16 gigs of RAM in your system, you got enough to like polish off

a few hundred megabytes for this thing. So this is like when you're not yet ready to run your whole OS from RAM, like a starter step? Are you going to do that? Is that one of yours? No, no. Yeah.

I mean, I could definitely see why you'd want to run the entire system from RAM, to be honest with you. But the nice thing about this is like, even on my laptops where I've got 16 gigs, this is running in the background. I never think about it. It just works super solid.

It just works, which is what you need if you're going to be trusting all your browsing with it. Yeah, and you can set it up with one of them systemd units and have it run under your own account, and I'll have a link for that information in the show notes. Now, I want to tell you about a new tool that I use. It's going to kind of pair with another tip I have that is like a first world tip. I'm going to admit that, but I'll start with a tool that I have recently started using called is very simply GPU viewer. And I'm going to warn you, it's not the prettiest app, but it is a graphical application that give you front-end information to a bunch of under-the-hood apps

like GLX Info, Vulkan Info, CLI Info, ES2 Info. And what it does is it builds you a really nice media info style list of information about your graphics card, your driver, any of those kinds of details, even your CPU information, your OpenCL support, your OpenGL support, your Vulkan support. So if you're trying to figure out what your deal is with Steam games or with any kind

of performance issue, this gives you everything you need to know about your graphics card. And where it comes in, soup's crazy handy, is my next kind of first worldy tip here is if you've got an Intel graphics laptop and you want to be a little foolish with your money. I do, I do. I really still today recommend an eGPU. Use it as a dock. It's such a thing of beauty. You guys know I've talked about this before on the show,

but I'm here to tell you that this is still the setup I'm using, and it's still working really well for me. After, what has it been, a year or more since we've talked about this before on the show, but I'm here to tell you that this is still the setup I'm using, and it's still working really well for me. After, what has it been, a year or more since we've talked about it on the show? Yeah, you were just showing me your new setup in the RV. It was fancy. Yeah, I got a new stand. So I've got the laptop. It's even closer to me, and it's a little higher, so that way I sit up better. And I've got a little mini clacky keyboard that I ordered online after getting one of those little tester kits.

I did the whole thing, and it's this little compact keyboard. I've got a little mini clacky keyboard that I ordered online after getting one of those little tester kits. I did the whole thing, and it's this little compact keyboard. I've got a Bluetooth mouse. I've got a game controller. I've got my wireless headphones that we reviewed on the show, still using those too. Another great Linux tool is those wireless Corsair headphones that use RF instead of Bluetooth. And, of course, I've got a couple of other things plugged in, like a phone and watch charging cable. All of that, though, all of it is plugged into the eGPU.

And one – oh, and power, of course. Of course. Power, of course. One cable comes from the eGPU into the laptop. One cable. And I don't know exactly why, but now I seem to be able to unplug and plug in the eGPU without my OS freezing.

So I can just come and go as I please, at least as soon as, I mean, Fedora 33, it hasn't been a problem yet. So maybe it's a newer kernel thing. Maybe it's because I don't use it as the dedicated GPU. I kind of use it more as an on-demand GPU. But man, does that work well for me. That is so slick. I have all my peripherals set up there.

All the wires, all that stuff go into the eGPU box. One Thunderbolt 3 cable comes to my laptop and then the way I use the GPU is as an environment variable before I launch the application or the Steam game, and there's guides on how to do this. I use an environment variable to say which GPU I want the application or the Steam game, and there's guides on how to do this.

I use an environment variable to say which GPU I want the application on. And so I essentially have an on-demand AMD GPU. And since it's an open source driver, there's no repercussions. Like if I do an NVIDIA card in that eGPU, then I always have the NVIDIA driver, and I always have the NVIDIA management software, and admin stuff, you know, whatever that application is. I always have that stuff on my box. And we have looked, and it does look for the NVIDIA GPU, and it can sometimes even freak out looking for the NVIDIA GPU when it's missing. And it will create a bunch of errors in your log. You

can see it happening when you run journal. Not what you need. And you also don't want to have to be disabling and re-enabling it or handling any of that. Which was the workaround we came up with is different, essentially, grub entries that disabled or enabled the NVIDIA card. But because it's an AMD graphics card and it takes up 10% of the kernel code, apparently, but the kernel driver is built in. It just works when it's there, and it is fine when it's not there. Like, it just doesn't care. That's so cool. Yeah, I switch between an Intel graphics and an AMD graphics, and I have all of my laptop cords going into that eGPU. And it's such a nice experience that it's like over a year since we talked about it. And I was actually showing Wes a picture of my setup this morning.

Like, I'm still loving it that much. And so GPU viewer makes it even easier to kind of get information. Is the system seeing my GPU? What is the information it does detect about it? All of that's in there and I really like it. Okay. I have just a couple more.

You ready? Yeah, almost. Okay. This one, you can probably guess, is for Unfilter mostly. But it's just really handy if you – there's a couple other tools to do this, but there's nothing simpler. If you just want to trim the ends of a video, maybe you took something on your phone, you've copied it over to your machine,

and you want to just trim it up a little bit, there is a GTK application that's kind of new. It's on Flathub and other places called simply Video Trimmer. And it lets you just cut out a fragment of video. You give it a start and end timestamp, and it will cut it. The video is never re-encoded. So the process is super fast, and it doesn't reduce the video quality. And that's the number one thing I like about it, is it is designed to not re-encode video. And you know,

that's kind of a big deal. It is. The UI is a little tricky when you have like an hour long video. But if you're working with a three minute video you took on your cell phone

or if you did a screen cap and you want to cut off like just the beginning and the end of the screen cap, it's super great for that. And it's a really straightforward UI. And it's crazy easy to get installed as a flat hub.

You mean I don't have to do this manually with FFmpeg anymore? AvidMux is my other favorite way to do it, but this makes AvidMux's UI look like it's from 1992. And I noticed you haven't mentioned this yet. What? It's written in Rust. No! It's written in Rust.

No! And then I'm just going to end on a couple bits of sage advice from a longtime Linux user. Come over here, sit by my fire for a moment. I'd like to tell you a story. Stay a while and listen. I highly recommend if you're a GTK desktopper, give Pop Theme a try. Go all in, get all of the packages,

get the icon theme, get the cursor theme, get the GTK theme. You don't have to do the auto-titling. Give Pop Theme a try. They've put a lot of thought into what should be highlighted so that way your attention is drawn to the right part of the UI at the right time.

Open save dialog boxes, pop-up boxes, they've put a lot of effort into that. And I've been using it on Pop, but I've also been using it on Fedora 33, which is wicked cool. And I have noticed over the last few weeks that they have put sort of emphasis on what should be the default and what you click on if you don't want the default.

And that kind of stuff is really nice. If you're a Plasma pal, I really want to suggest that you stick with Breeze, but give Breeze Dark a try. Breeze just keeps getting better and better. And Breeze Dark, it kind of makes you not see some of the unused white space that's in some of the plasma applications. And so not only do I find it just simply easier on the eyeballs, but I also think it kind of, for lack of a better word, kind of papers over some of the UI gaps and spaces that sort of drive me nuts sometimes. And the dark theme makes that all real nice, kind of makes it smooth,

and you don't notice that kind of stuff. So GTKers, I just got to say, even if you just do it for a week, give the pop theme a try. And Plasma Pals, go Breeze, but go Breeze hard and go Breeze dark. That's my sage longtime desktop advice. I've got a million other things,

but I feel like I've been talking for like five hours. So Wes, why don't you give us some of your favorite apps, tweaks, tools? I've been finding myself in the command line more and more these days. So mine mostly focus on how do you make life a little bit better while you're there? One tool I've been using more often is FZF,

a command line fuzzy finder. And this is just great. It's a general purpose command line fuzzy finder. And this is just great. It's a general purpose command line fuzzy finder, and it can use with basically anything, a list, files, command processes, history, host names. So let's say you want to SSH to a box. Once you've got this installed and set up, you also add a star star and hit tab. And then this thing goes and looks through all your SSH configuration, stuff like that, finds hosts that exist, offers right there with a really slick Curses interface that drops right down and lets you find it.

One thing I didn't even realize until looking over the main page again was it integrates with Kill. So, you know, I'm trying to Kill-9 something. Yes, there's tons of ways to find it. But you just hit tab and it pops an interactive environment right there in your terminal where you can browse through, hit enter, process is gone. That's super nice. That for kill right there is a winner.

So that's the command line fuzzy finder, FCF. How have I not heard of this before? I don't know. You know, I think it's actually pretty popular. I don't think it's been a pick here, although it's definitely been a pick elsewhere around the Linux ecosystem. And if you haven't tried it, I think it's worth a shot. And it slots into pretty much all the shells they've got. You know, it's definitely going to pick elsewhere around the Linux ecosystem. If you haven't tried it, I think it's worth a shot

and it slots into pretty much all the shells they've got. It's easy to install. They've got a little script that will add it and customize your config so that it works nicely.

It's great. Does it work with the best shell? Yes, it does. This has got to be one of your picks, right? It is, yes. So,

I've been using a Mac a little more for work as we've talked about. That's been totally fine. not what this is about. But I had been using that as an opportunity to play with ZSH more, because that's now the default shell over there in OS X. How is ZSH? Not bad. I like it. It's a good shell.

There's a lot of neat stuff, certainly better than Bash, as you might say. But I'm back on Phish. Yeah, it's no Phish, right? Phish is just so easy. And it does so many of these things that I might otherwise want to customize or pull in or configure that Phish just does for me. And I love that there's things that I don't need to save

and I don't need to automate or they're just not worth the time of doing it, but Phish bridges that gap. So if I'm going to go back to a project and I'm in that folder again after three months, well, the build commands are just right there in Phish's memory. That is exactly what it is,

is you go into an environment, you haven't been there in weeks or months, you kind of remember the commands you ran, but you don't quite know what it was or what the flags were, and you start to type what you do remember and Phish auto-completes the freaking rest. It's just, it's so great.

And there's other ways to crack this too, right? I guess you don't have to use Phish if you don't want to change your whole shell. Yeah, there are things. You know, FCF can help with some of this stuff. And then there are a bunch of tools that I had been using in past installations just around helping you get around your file system. If you have common activities, common locations you go for certain workloads, there's all kinds of nice tools.

Things like AutoJump or Jump or Smart CD is another one that I've used. All of this can be pretty handy if for some reason you just can't use Phish. I saw you had an entry in here in the doc for the Chromecast lifestyle, which I don't know if we fully outed you for, but you are a hardcore caster. If I'm not watching it on my laptop or my phone, then it's definitely going on my Chromecast.

That's the primary method I watch basically everything. But that's how you get everything on your television. And so having some tools to make that easier is definitely necessary. To start with, just MK Chromecast. That's a pretty popular application. It just lets you, it integrates in, it handles all the transcoding, figuring things out,

plays really nicely with Pulse Audio, adds a device, and then anything you select to output there just shows up on your Chromecast. Oh, that's cool. If you're using Chrome, you can just cast from inside Chrome, and that works pretty darn decently. But if there's other applications, stuff you're doing on the desktop that isn't in a browser, this is the way to do it.

Could you do a full video that way? You know, I don't know if it can. You can play the video file, so that's pretty easy. I'm not sure about for streaming, you have to do a little more work. Yeah, why not just play the file then? Okay. And so that's where the next two picks come in. So that was MK Chromecast.

MK Chromecast. All right. What do you got next? Cat, which has previously been a pick on the show. Cast all the things. And this guy is just great. You throw any file at it, pretty much. It will figure out if it needs to transcode it.

It spins up a little server automatically locally to play it on the Chromecast and sends it right over. C-A-T-T. C-A-T-T. Cast all the things. Yeah, I recall that. That is really nice that it spins up the server that the Chromecast is expecting. Right. And it has good support, like if you've got multiple devices or, you know, like an audio Google, whatever they're called now.

I forget the names. Mini? No. HomePod? Yeah. Google version of HomePod. It also integrates with YouTube DL if you've got that around. So you can just say like, hey, cast this link to a YouTube URL and it'll figure it out for you. Nice. The one thing it's not as great though is kind of controlling. You can control it, but it's not as intuitive as I like.

So there's another program called Cast Now. And that's my last little Chromecast utility. This can also stream. It's not quite as good, so I don't use it for that. I just use it as a little heads-up display in the terminal. It'll figure out what's playing. It shows you a little menu of what is it currently casting, and then you can just spacebar to pause. You can adjust the volume. You can

seek. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So this is like a remote control in the command line? Yep. Oh my gosh, that's cool. That is so neat. And you put it in a drop-down terminal? That's the way to go. Right? You just have it

available whenever you want. That's CastNow. We'll have links to all of this at linuxunplugged.com slash 379. Huh.

And so can you, but you don't use that to send any files, you just use that to manage whatever is playing. Yeah. It can do that, and

I used to use that in the past, but I've found Cat is more actively maintained and just does a better job of it. Okay, now, can you help me

with this one? Because I know that you got a web browser, but that's not good enough. And you got Vim, and that's not good enough. But if I could somehow take Vim

and put it in my web browser, maybe then I could have the perfect browsing experience. So what do you have for me? Well, why don't you try Trideactyl? Tridactyl, really? A Vim-like interface for Firefox.

Okay. So you can move around the browser using Vim commands and whatnot? Yes, and there's also Vimperator. Previously, there was Pentadactyl, which is where the name Tridactyl comes from. So there's some Chrome options here as well if you're not using Firefox. But if you want to be a little more efficient and you're just really hooked on Vim like some of us, you can take it to the next level. Do you

actually have this set up right now? Can you do this? I don't have it on this system, but on my main web browsing machine at home, yeah. Because it's just so easy. If I want to close a tab, you hit D. Then the tab is gone. And if you've already got these sort of built-in muscle memory from using VI in the command line all the time.

And, you know, I turn those settings on. I use it when we edit show notes in Code EMD. I use it in my IDEs for work. It's just a natural extension. And I don't know. I don't go crazy with it. You can like make, you know, use it to select text on the page

and find stuff and all that. I just use the sort of basic navigations, moving between tabs, stuff like that. On your home computer. Yeah. On your Mint box. Well, you know, you basic navigations, moving between tabs, stuff like that. On your home computer? Yeah. On your Mint box? Well, you know, you got to customize Mint. You got to make it yours. Okay, Drew, I know you've got a few desktop tweaks and apps that you like to use,

and I want to hear them. Yeah, I do. So my first one is more of a tip. It's use your damn home slash dot local directory. I got so sick of cluttering up my root folder. I was like, there's got to be a better way. So it turns out there's a dot local folder. Usually it has just like a single folder in there, share. And then it's got like your applications, overrides, your fonts that you've installed locally, stuff like that. But you can do tons of stuff in there.

overrides your fonts that you've installed locally, stuff like that. But you can do tons of stuff in there. And in fact, most distros that I've used recently have home slash dot local slash bin in your default path. So that is a perfect place to put all of your little scripts and things like that. That's a great one. That's good. All the Rust applications you just downloaded. Exactly.

What did you say, Wes? That's a good one, though, because that.local is just sitting there. It's yours for the using. Yeah, and I even use it for, you know, I use NextCloud, and anytime I switch to a different desktop,

like I go to Ubuntu or Pop or Fedora or whatever, I just resync all my stuff, and I do a home slash.local slash config, and then I do a home slash dot local slash config. And then I symlink from there into my real config folder. And that way I can keep all of my config stuff all sorted out and synced. A one-stop shop.

Yeah. So use that folder. Use it for so many things because why not? And it keeps your home folder clean. So my second thing is just for Debian people or Debian adjacent like Ubuntu or Pop, and that is the Licorix kernel. I find it really quite snappy, and it just feels more like a really smooth desktop experience. So for those maybe like not familiar,

this is like a specially tuned, like desktop focused kernel? Yeah, exactly. I started looking at it because I was looking for something that was a little better for pro audio than just the regular low latency kernel. But once I started using it,

I was like, wow, you know, everything feels more responsive. And now it's like the first thing I install as soon as I am on a Debian system. Oh, okay. Just Debian, though? Well, and Ubuntu. Anything Debian-based.

Man, I want it for Fedora. Yeah, no, it's not available for Fedora, but it's built on the Zen patch set. So if that gives you any indication of kind of what they're doing under the hood there. But I do have something for Fedora users. And this one is really, really cool. It is Pipewire Nightly. It is a repo in Copper that gives you the latest and greatest unstable goodness. Oh, you're speaking our language.

Yeah, it's for adventurous people. But I'm using it. I'm actually using it right now. And it is handling all of my pulse, all of my jack. And in the latest builds, it even supports Flatpak. Yeah, and that's actually kind of useful in a way that I hadn't appreciated before. Can you describe what that means? Which part?

The Flatpak support? Yeah, Flatpak supporting Pipewire and the screenshot you sent us. Okay, so previously, Flatpak would not talk to the Pulse server that Pipewire is spinning up. So what they ended up doing, and by they, I mean Wim Tamens, is they're spinning up a second Pulse server just for Flatpak applications that then routes audio back in. So I can spin up something in Flatpak and I can route it to a jack application. I can just run it straight as a pulse straight to my system. I can do whatever I want to with any Flatpak apps just like I would a normal regular app on my desktop. That's great. That's how we'd want it. Yeah. Now it is still a little buggy. flat pack apps just like I would a normal regular app on my desktop.

That's great. That's how we'd want it. Yeah. Now, it is still a little buggy. I have had it where if I've got like Spotify running for hours, it'll start stuttering after a little while. But closing it and reopening it respawns the server and it's fine after that. So again, for adventurous users, but it's really coming along. Great. That's good news. I know what I'm installing after the show. And then I'm really glad you put this last one in here because I think if you're using Firefox, this seems like a must-do. Yeah, well, especially if you're using the default AdWay to theme. It is essentially a CSS hack that will turn your Firefox into something that looks truly GNOME native.

It's super simple to install. You can configure it in the About Config menu instead of having to hack on the actual config files themselves. And it just looks really nice. I like that it supports the ESR release as well. Yeah. There's really no way to state how nice, and it just makes Firefox look native. It looks nice, and it makes it look like a GTK application

that even looks good on Plasma as well. I just think I really, really wish this is how Firefox just natively looked on Linux. Agreed. It's super nice. It's great. It's clean. It looks like it belongs on the Linux desktop.

So I'll have a link to that. That's a really good one, and it's one that I need to set up. I just realized when I saw that link in there, I was like, oh, I don't have that installed right now. So that's what I'm going to do. Thank you, Drew. Those are good ones. And we'll have links to all of Drew's, all of Wes's, and mine in the show notes.

And then if you're in the mobile room and you want to share one with us, let's do it in the post show. You know, let's sneak them in there. That's what it's there for. That's right. Well, thanks to a cloud group for sponsoring this here episode

of the Unplugged program. They have a Python 3 scripting course for system administrators that we'll have linked in the show notes. It's pretty nice. You develop the skills you need to write effective, powerful scripts and create command line tools using, you guessed it, Python 3. But beyond the language itself, you'll go through the full development process, including project setup, planning and automating testing to build two different command line tools, and more. It's pretty great. We'll have a link in the show notes if you want to check it out. Python 3 scripting for system administrators at a CloudGuru.

Go to cloudguru.com or use the link in our show notes. Let's do a little bit of feedback, Mr. Payne. We got some on YouTube DL. And Hans wrote in, and this is a bit of feedback, Mr. Payne. We got some on YouTube DL. And Hans wrote in, and this is a really long email, Wes. But he essentially thought that when we touched on the YouTube DL issue, that we probably could have given more GitLab love, you know, given a little more attention to GitLab.

He's been self-hosting on GitTIAA and he's running it out of his living room. That's great. And then he just mirrors his repositories to both GitHub and GitLab. Oh, very nice. Which is a pretty interesting approach. And I kind of think we touched on a little bit. That's why I didn't like specifically mention GitLab. I think we just kind of mentioned

various self-hosting tools and that maybe some of these projects are going to have to consider that. Yeah, and what's the right setup? How do you maybe take advantage of some of the GitHub discovery factor, community building factor, but also make sure that, well, if they decide to do what they want to do or can do at any time, you've still got your project,

all the resources necessary to continue development. Yeah, and we also speculated about some other reasons beyond, like, DMCA takedowns that might motivate projects into doing that. Do you want to take the free IPA feedback? Because we asked people what their thoughts were on running Active Directory now that both Fedora and Ubuntu have built-in support in their installers to join an Active Directory domain. I started thinking this might be a decent homeland solution, but I don't really want to deploy Windows. And so we asked people to write in with their experience using free tools. Matthias wrote in, in the latest look, you had

mentioned wanting to set up Active Directory or FreeIPA. I have been using FreeIPA in my house and home lab for a little more than a year, and I love it. You can use it to manage the SSH keys, shells, users, groups, and SSL certs, all from one pretty UI that looks and uses the same UI framework as Cockpit, which, hey, that looks pretty nice. Oh, really? That is very nice, actually. I note that also it's possible to manage several other aspects besides just your desktop login,

but other single sign-on aspects of a network. That's kind of nice. And setting up LDAP for things like NextCloud and GitLab seems to work, too. I don't know. I looked at free IPA and it looked like a hell of a project, Wes. You and I have thought about doing it and we just, I don't know, we haven't quite been motivated to pull the trigger on it. And maybe it's because our login system has been working just fine the way we do it. We kind of have a standard system here at the studio. We have our own systems for our own

machines. Well, it's a lot. You know, studio. We have our own systems for our own machines. Well, it's a lot. You know, there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot going on and a lot for us to learn. So I think if we do, we need to, you know, dedicate some time to it.

But we're also maybe interested in some minimal, smaller, what's the, you know, what's the bare bone system that gets us some of those images, but that we actually have an understanding of. Yeah, I don't really need to become

an active director or LDAP administrator. I don't want to to become Active Director or LDAP Administrator. I don't want to. No. Patrick wrote in about Xenitol, which looks like, spelled like it's some sort of medication. I think it's a sugar-free gum.

Yeah, right, exactly. He says he's a developer at a small engineering embedded systems company, about five people or so. So he handles all the IT for everybody. And he said he wanted to share his experience. They have a 15-year-old Windows 2003 AD server, and they moved it to something Linux-based.

He's been using Zenital as their AD server for about a year now, and he's been pretty happy with it. He says it has a good web UI for managing services, users, and groups. Unfortunately, you do need the Windows admin tools on a Windows machine if you want to do anything complicated with group policy. But he says he doesn't have a need for that. We would not have a need for that. No, definitely not.

And he says, we have a mix of Windows and Linux clients. Both work great. I renamed our domain in the process and migrated the Windows clients to the new domain. Turned out to be super easy. It was a little more annoying to get my Ubuntu 20.04 system connected, but it wasn't too bad. It's nice to be able to just log into my workstation

using the same login I use everywhere else in the office. Yeah, I bet. And now it's even easier in 2010. It's built into be able to just log into my workstation using the same login I use everywhere else in the office. Yeah, I bet. And now it's even easier in 2010. It's built into Ubiquiti. He says, I've never used any other LDAP servers, so I can't really compare, but I imagine using Active Directory Server in a Linux, all Linux shop probably isn't worth it. I would assume the Linux domain servers would be better integrated. It'd be definitely nice to join an AD domain to the installer, but using the installer, but hopefully they make it easy to join to an existing computer too.

When I was trained as a Windows administrator back in the late 90s, I was shocked when I came to Linux and discovered there wasn't a central authentication system just by default out of the box. Right. Because in the Windows land, you just get domain controllers and Active Directory. That just is part of the Windows server package. It's got the big old, yeah, right?

That's part of it. In Linux, you have to roll it yourself. And so that's why Zinital and FreeIPA are, I think, kind of a more compelling solution to someone like myself, because I come from a background where I actually have rolled all of these components myself. I did one major install for a company that doesn't exist anymore, but it was a meal-on-demand delivery company. And the entire backend infrastructure was on Linux. It was using LDAP.

And we did have Windows machines that joined the Samba-powered domain. And we used that central LDAP for web authentication, for internet authentication, for email authentication. I mean, for a short period, you know, for a couple of years, I was really living the dream there. But I've just never really been compelled since then. I mean, if I could throw together something in a container or a virtual machine and then go to a web UI and kind of just have a decent, like, cockpit-style web UI to set it up.

Just enough to, like, yeah, manage whatever shared system users we might need. That might not be so bad. I could see doing that. I could see that. Before we go on, I want to thank our Unplugged Core contributors, unpluggedcore.com. The Core contributors keep Unplugged independent. As long as we can, we'll keep doing this show independently.

And you also help reduce the ad load needed to make the show profitable. Keeping us unplugged. That's right. And you know what else it really means is when we don't have a sponsor, like, you know, maybe stuff goes bad and we don't get a sponsor for a little bit. The core contributors can keep the base cost of the show covered so we can still get it edited, produced. And when you become a core contributor, you get access to two feeds.

One feed is a limited ad feed. Same full production, all of the mix, the editing, just limited ads. And then there's feed two, which is the full uncut live stream has the pre-show that never got recorded. The one where we were playing videos, the post-show, all of our screw ups, the restarts, the mistakes, doesn't bleep anything. If we swear, there's nothing like that. It's all just raw, full transparency for our core contributors. It's available as a second feed, and it's like an extra show. And in this case, where we're recording early, well, they get the show several days before the final release. Hey, isn't that nice?

So there's those perks, too. You get it pretty much as soon as we're done, which can be an advantage sometimes. Thank you to our core contributors, unpluggedcore.com. Well, Mr. Payne, I think that's everything we have for today. I don't think we really need to do any picks. We have picks, but I don't think we just did a whole bunch of picks. We sure did.

We just did like 20,000 picks. I know, I know. And I can hear Joe in here going, you're going on too long. You got to stop. I can hear him. That's not what he sounds like at all, but in my head, that's what he sounds like. I think we need a clip of this.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. This time, it'll be Sunday. A little afternoon. Join the virtual lug. Hang out with him for a bit and then when Wes and I are done with Linux Action News, we'll hop on the live stream. That's perfect. You just warm up with the lug, get chatting,

get ready to share your Linux opinions, and then we'll be there. Live Linux Unplugged? Yep. JBLive.tv Noon 30 Pacific, maybe one o'clock. I don't know. Sometimes you got to snack, you know. That's just a fact. The news, you don't rush the news. So we're not starting until we're done with the news.

That's just the reality. We'd love to have you join us next Sunday. We're just doing these two out of order. Then we're back to our regular Tuesday time slot. You, of course, can just subscribe and just skip the show when we release it. And just don't worry about it. That's at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. Links to everything we talked about today linuxunplugged.com slash 379 and your feedback at slash contact. And one last time, that mumble info is linuxunplugged.com slash mumble.

Thanks for joining us. See you back here next Tuesday. this is one of those episodes where next time I reload a machine, I'll be going back to the website and like, remember, what did Wes say? What did Drew say? I'll be clicking on your link. So that's how you chose this topic. I do that. There's like certain shows I go back to the show notes myself after I set up a new rig. That's why next week we're going over to how to install Arch.

No, no, I don't think so. No, I'm pretty happy with Fedora these days. And really, the Ubuntus keep killing it too. It's a hard task for a distro to get me to move off that. And when I do, it tends to be Manjaro these days. I got my three, you know. I'm a multi-distro man. I've got commitment issues to a single distro, but I can live a three-distro lifestyle and I can live it pretty happily.

You found the right balance. That's right. Well, I'll tell you what I've been playing with lately that would be really helpful for you is Ansible. Just Ansible all of your initial setup

and just run a script and you're back where you started, but on, you know, a new OS. I don't know me known Ansibles, but I know me

that I know some Ansibles, but I don't know me Ansibles. You know what I mean? Yeah. What I'm saying is I need to know me some Ansibles because but I know me that I know some Ansibles, but I don't know me Ansibles. You know what I mean? Yeah. What I'm saying is I need to know me some Ansibles because I've got these Raspberry Pis that, you know, SD card could pop, USB disk could pop. I could have to just swap it out and swap it in with a new Raspberry Pi and it'd be really great in that kind of environment to just redeploy everything to it and not go

back and reset up the OS and custom install the packages and custom configure the... You don't want to install Docker Compose another time. All that and tweak the SSH config as I do. Just all the changes I make, I should just get it set up once and then deploy. Well, between Alex and myself, I'm willing to bet we could get you something,

get you something rolling. It turns out if you try hard enough, you can.