LINUX Unplugged - 405: Distro in the Rough

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

We’re taking a look at an underdog distro. We may have found a diamond in the rough with a few tricks up its filesystem. Plus our review of the ODROID-Go Super an Ubuntu-powered handheld, and our tools for laptop battery health.

So we're all familiar with the perpetual joke about Linux on a toaster, but Linux on a microwave, it's real and it's here. Sensory's truly natural embedded speech recognition and natural language platform improves the ease of use and feature accessibility in consumer products. This domain-specific assistant allows natural language voice controls on small appliances, such as a microwave, without requiring an internet connection. No confusing setup and no risk of lost privacy. Just what you've always wanted.

Sensory is truly natural. Now you have voice control for a microwave. I like that we're on the other side of the hype cycle now, where suddenly privacy is in vogue again. Listen to these guys. They're using their voice to control their microwave. Voice genie, cook for one minute and ten seconds. Voice genie, pause.

Now, I love that it's all local, Wes, but where do we draw the line? Do we really need voice systems that are all independent and separate, built into each and every device? Am I some, like, old-school 80s network engineer that I want everything centralized? I want one system that's aware of everything. They can communicate with the endpoints. Not each endpoint having its own voice assistant. I mean, I think there are advantages to having things integrated, but until you get real standards that do respect your privacy, this might be a nice compromise. One of the things that they laud here when they're trying to sell this all offline customizable thing is you can use a particular brand to talk to instead of having to say like, hey, big name cloud company, do this for me.

But I don't know. It's all powered by Linux. So I think I would say something like, okay, Linus, start Linux Unplugged. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Is that a travel size of talcum powder you brought?

Oh, yeah. It's actually smaller than you know. You never want to be in somewhere and not smell fresh, Wes. So I appreciate that, you know? You're a guy that cares about that. This episode is brought to you by the all-new A Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for Cloud Linux and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified, get hired, and get learning at acloudguru.com.

Well, it's not all about talcum powder today. Coming up on the show, we're taking a look at a bit of a distro underdog. We may have found a bit of a diamond in the rough that has a few tricks that we were surprised to come across. And today, finally, after weeks and weeks of playing around, I'm going hands-on with the Odroid Super Go, which is a Linux handheld gaming tablet. Not tablet. Actually, it's more like a Switch. You know, the Nintendo Switch Lite? It's like that, only it runs Ubuntu and it's got an Odroid in there.

I'll tell you all about that. Wait, what? Yep. It's really cool, Wes. I can't wait to show it to you. And also, I have a battery emergency. My battery is in bad shape in my new ThinkPad. I can't believe it. It's already in bad shape. So I'm going to share the tools that I'm using to try to save my ThinkPad's battery and maybe, hopefully, extend its life. But before we get into all of that, I want to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual Linux users group. Hello, mobile room.

Hello. Hello. What do you make? Hello, Chris. Hello, Wes. Hello, everybody. 25 of you in there hanging out. We have some in the on-air, some in the quiet listening.

Just the backup we need. They are our wingmen. You can join our Mumble Room. It's open to the whole world. The information is linked up at linuxunplugged.com. Hey, before we get into the rest of the show, I want to put a special request out there for your questions. We want to do a Q&A episode. Any topic is open. You can ask us anything, and we'll answer as many as we

can on the show about the show, about JB, about Linux, whatever it might be. We'd like your questions because at the end of the month, I'm taking a family trip to Bozeman, Montana. I love Bozeman. And every year, I try to make it out there and make it going a little early, making it a little earlier this year. And while I'm gone, we want to record an episode that can go out in the feeds while I'm out in Montana that will be the Ask Us Anything episode. And that's coming up really soon. So if you're listening to this episode around the time it was released, you have until the weekend because we're likely going to be recording this Sunday potentially. So go to asklup.com and there's just a really simple form there. You can fill it out and send us in your question, or you can just use the contact form like always, or the email we're going to be using

both asklup.com and submit your question into the show and ask us just about anything. Um, because, uh, well, we, we thought it'd be really fun. We've never, ever done that. In 405 episodes, we've never done an Ask Us Anything episode. And, you know, it's a great chance to get another domain, asklup.com. So go there and submit your questions into the show. So let's start with the Odroid Go Super this week, that handheld device I was just mentioning. And Pycrash, right off the top, I know you have a question about it.

that handheld device I was just mentioning. And Pycrash, right off the top, I know you have a question about it. For me, the Odroid, it was more like a Game Boy or maybe something like a retro handheld, something like that. Yeah, that's fair, because it is more about the retro games, absolutely. And so the Odroid Ghost Super was announced in December for a price of $80. And it has remained completely sold out everywhere until this week. It's actually back in stock and available for purchase, so I wanted to tell you guys all about it. And yeah, overall, it's like a Game Boy in terms of some of its

functionality, but the build, it's like a Nintendo Switch Lite, which isn't surprising. The original Old Red Go from 2018 looked like a Game Boy itself, and then they had an Advance later on that looked like a Game Boy Advance. But this is a shocking price, $80. That's less than half the price of a Nintendo Switch. And it has support for PlayStation 1 games, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Atari, Mame Station, a lot of classic game consoles.

It is missing a few. It is missing a few, but it's got a lot. With a 5-inch LCD display running at 854 by 480 resolution. It's got a Rockchip RK3326 quad-core Cortex A35 ARM processor. A Mali-G31 MP2 GPU. Oh, and it's booting up right now as I'm using it. A 4,000 milliamp battery, so it's decent battery life. I charge it over USB-C and really have had no complaints because I pretty much always

have it plugged into my desk, but now it's been unplugged for about a day and a half and I'm still at full charge. A gigabyte of RAM on this thing. It has a mono speaker. It has a headphone jack. a gigabyte of RAM on this thing. It has a mono speaker. It has a headphone jack.

It has a USB 2A port so you can plug dongles in because it does not come with Wi-Fi built in. And it just takes a 5 volt, 1.5 amp charger. And this thing, this thing all fits in your hand with a really, really good comfort level.

The buttons, I'd say, are not the best. They're not quite switch quality, but they're better than some of the earlier builds that you'll see reviews that are based on earlier versions of the Odroid. They improved it when they moved on

from the transparent case. I still don't love the buttons, but they're pretty good. And they're laid out a lot like you'd see on a switch. You've got a D-pad, you've got two thumb joysticks, and you've got a Y, X, B, and A keys. And it ships with Ubuntu 18.04. Well, actually it doesn't ship with anything, but they keys. And it ships with Ubuntu 18.04. Well, actually, it doesn't ship with anything.

But they make it very easy to get Ubuntu 18.04 on there. It doesn't ship with a microSD card. You have to supply that on your own. So no Wi-Fi and no microSD card. But those are pretty easy to come by these days. And the 5-inch screen on this thing is just glorious. The screen really is the high point. You don't normally get a screen this good for an $80 device,

and it really makes these old games just absolutely pop. And I really enjoyed the nostalgia aspect of playing, like, my old Game Gear games, my old Star Trek games that I used to play forever. And the fact that at the end of the day when I'm done playing with this thing, I have Ubuntu 18.04, well, that makes up for a lot of the, oh,'m done playing with this thing, I have Ubuntu 1804. Well, that makes up for a lot of the... Oh yeah, here's Spider-Man. Sounds good.

Yeah, and that's not even up all the way. The fact that it has 1804 on there makes up for a lot. You can SSH into this thing and install packages and, you know, it's a real full Linux box. And then what they do, Wes, and this makes it really kind of approachable for the rest of the family. What they do is they ship it with their image with emulation station on top. So it's

Ubuntu 18.04 underneath and then emulation station on top of that. And that is a graphical themable emulator front end that allows you to get access to all the games in one place, and it works really well with controller input. And the default theme is clean. It's a nice PS3 style UI, easy to use. Yeah, this looks really nice. I mean, both professional, because it's got all the logos built in here, you know, kind of a slick, slidey UI, but also just clear and easy to use, familiar to someone who's used a different, you know, but similar kind of game platform. Emulation Station is what's up. I mean, you could put just about any ROM on this, you kind of want. I mean, even Lineage OS on this thing. It's got, you know, it's an OJRIDEN here. You could do it what you want. But Emulation Station has that family acceptance factor,

and I'm really glad they made that their default Ubuntu image. Because if you can use a console, a game console, you can use the UI on this tiny little handheld Linux computer. And the fact that all the games are just listed there, all of the different emulators, simple, easy,

the family approval factor has been high. They pick it up and they go like they would with any commercial device, like they would with a multi-hundred dollar device. And I've loaded up

with a bunch of great games, so they don't even have to think about it. They just sit down and start playing. How was that process? Was it easy to get them loaded? Was there just a folder you could dump them to on the SD card? Did you do it over USB? How did that work? You got a couple of options. This is where I think maybe, Wes, it's kind of a little bit for more technically savvy people. If you don't have any experience with computers, this is going to be tricky because...

So people who like to mess with computers. It... So people who like to mess with computers. It's for people who like to mess with computers. Yeah, you have to either use Samba or SCP once it's up on the network to get the files on there. You could probably pop in the SD card and mount them and find them there. But what they've done by default is they've turned Samba on and they've shared out a couple of directories, a config directory that you need to, say, enable Sega CD support,

which I have links for information on that in the notes. And like another directory for all the different ROMs that are supported. And it has each architecture that it supports in there and then you just drop the ROM files in there. Over Samba is kind of the best way. And that's with you like bridging with the USB 2 port then?

Like you're plugging that into your phone or something or right into a network device? I opted just to plug in an Ethernet dongle into the USB 2 port then? Like you're plugging that into your phone or something or right into a network device? I opted just to plug in an Ethernet dongle into the USB-A port. Oh, sure, right, because this thing's just run in Linux, so USB Ethernet adapter, right. Anything the Linux kernel supports, this thing supports. And so I've got an Ethernet adapter that works great with Linux. It's USB 3.

This is only a 2 port, but I plug it right in and it works. I just love the image of that too, right? Like that's not something you generally would see on a Switch version of this. It's just this nice dongle hanging off the side with an Ethernet jack, and that's how you know it's meant for nerds. You know, it works too because if you think about it, you're mostly playing all retro ROMs on this thing. And you don't add a lot of those at a rapid pace.

You kind of get them all on there, and then you're kind of done. Right, and they don't have network connectivity, so you don't need it for that. Right. So besides the initial setup, I haven't missed having Wi-Fi. And the fact that this has great battery life and we can take it in the car and my kids don't need to ask if they can like tether to my phone to use their app, you know, they can just play games, and it just works. And at $80, I feel much more comfortable buying a few of these for my kids than I do Switches at $300. And the fact that I can just duplicate the SD cards so they all have the same games and the same UI,

it's a much more manageable experience that way. I don't know if I'm necessarily going to keep it for myself, but I think I'm going to take Emulation Station, and I think I'm going to put that on a Raspberry Pi, my Pi 400 potentially, and use that as a great, and hook up a controller and just use that as a way to play retro games, because Emulation Station is fantastic.

And you don't need an Odroid for that. You can put it on pretty much any system. And then I'll let my kids play with this. Oh yeah, they've even got Windows support on here, Raspberry Pi dedicated images, as well as support for Debian and a package in the AUR. I just put a little SanDisk Ultra 256 gigabyte micro SD card in it. And, you know, these ROMs, with the exception of like the PlayStation portable ROMs

and the Sega CD ROMs, all the other ROMs are tiny. They're tiny. But man, the Sega CD games were not as good as I remembered. I haven't been able to emulate a Sega CD in a very long time. And my dad got one way back in the day. And I guess he didn't like it because he ended up giving it to me and I put it in my bedroom. And at the time, I didn't really connect the dots. It was because my old man didn't like it very much. But then I loaded the Sega CD up on this thing and started the old Jurassic Park game. And it was like a low rent version of Myst. It was real bad, Wes. It was so bad. But you got all that nostalgia. There's a lot of great ways to play retro games. We are not lacking. There's Retro Pi. There's this Odroid Go Super. This, though, I think this sort of takes

the cake because it's the controller, it's the Linux box, it's all in one, and it's got that beautiful five-inch screen that just crushes it for these old retro games on there. And then once it's set up, it's essentially appliance level. It just, you turn it on, it boots fairly fast for an entire complex operating system on there, and you're off to go to the races. And if you want to be crazy and SSH in there and install a web server or something, you absolutely can. So for $80, I think it's an easy recommend. I describe it like this.

It feels like a device that's about $90 to $100 in manufacturing quality for $80. Hey, that's not a bad deal. Right? You do have to add your own Wi-Fi, your own storage, and likely your own power, too, because I don't think mine came with a power adapter. It just uses USB-C.

It does seem like a nice deal for that price, though, just in that if you want something kind of hanging around, a portable device that you can use for gaming, if you're into that, or maybe you get bored with some of the ROMs that you have, but you can also just use it as an extra Linux machine to hack on. I mean, I'm already kind of imagining some fun projects. Like, I wonder if our software we use to control the mixer in the studio would run on there. Yeah, and I think the takeaway from this is check out Emulation Station, too,

if you're not interested in buying a piece of hardware. This reminds me of this cartridge that I got. It's called the EverDrive, and it's a Super Nintendo cartridge that you plug into a physical Super Nintendo console. And what makes this cartridge special is that it has an SD card slot in the top of it that you can pop in there loaded with ROMs. And so you can take every SNES game that ever existed and put it on this SD card and pop it in the cartridge, put that in your Super Nintendo, and you get access to every Nintendo game from one cartridge. It's really great, but you have to have all of that old retro hardware.

And I have that here in the studio. We've got a Super Nintendo. We've even got a CRT monitor for it. We have the controllers, and it works great. But you get all that kind of same experience with this Odroid, and you could, too, probably on something else, I admit. But the Odroid lets you do it all in one package. So I really like it.

The Odroid goes super for $80. We'll have a link in the show notes. It's not a sponsored thing. They didn't pay or anything like that. But I wanted to pick it up for you guys, and I've been holding on to it while it's been out of stock. And Wes, you got a chance to play around with it, too. I'm curious, what were your kind of initial impressions of the build quality and stuff? Yeah, really not bad.

The screen seemed quite bright, and I liked the colors. The joysticks left a little bit to be desired. I mean, definitely not like full, regular sort of game, you know, first-class game controller level, but not bad. I mean, I think it would work, especially for some of these, you know, classic games where you don't need that fine of control. Anyway, the D-pad felt not bad, and there were a lot of buttons. Not all of them were great, but it seemed like you could make it work for a variety of use cases. Linode.com slash unplugged. Linode is our hosting provider for everything that we've built over the

last couple of years. And if you go to linode.com slash unplugged, you get a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. And you can try everything out that we've been talking about. And unlike entry-level hosting providers or the big clouds like AWS that try to lock you in and tie your hands down, Linode gives you the tools to get the most out of their crazy fast systems. You get 11 data centers to choose from, and every service level is backed by the best customer support in the business. And when that matters, it really makes all the difference.

It's not just like one great thing about Linode that we go on about, but it's all of the various aspects of Linode coming together that make them our go-to choice for anything we're going to build today or in the future. It's really kind of a special combination of super fast hardware, really dedicated staff, people who see deeply into the future of Linux and are really passionate about that, and kind of a mission to focus on a core set of products and make them as good as possible. And now they are the largest independent cloud computing provider, been around since 2003. And they always ask themselves, what layer can we now bake in Linux when they're building the next thing? On their blog, they have the story

about becoming their own ISP. And this was a while ago. And so the areas that they were going to use Linux and networking was really pushing the envelope. But again, they saw where Linux was going. And so they built towards that. And if you're not catching out Linode's tutorials that they've been doing with HackerSploit,

you're missing out on some of the great chances that Linode makes for you to learn and kind of get insights into securing servers on the public web. One of my favorites recently is learning the various tools for commands and logging and monitoring and just checking on the health of your box. We'll have a link to that. But really, go over to linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 for your new account and try this stuff out for yourself. Go build something or maybe use this as an opportunity to learn something. They have really quick ways to take snapshots and destroy systems and rebuild systems and bring them right back to where they're at from backups if you want to try learning something as well. There's a lot of ways to host something.

And, you know, there's a lot of various companies that are going to let you host. They're going to do it. But none of them, none of them are as good as Linode. Go see why we choose Linode every single time. Linode.com slash unplugged. All right, let's do ourselves a spot of housekeeping. I'm curious. I didn't ask you before the show, MiniMac, but I'm curious to know how the Leplug went this Sunday.

It went really well. We had a good attendance. We had over 20 people, and we had a deep talk about the Minecraft project. The recording is about one hour, one and a half hour. And yeah, it was really, really cool. That's great. Again, I have to thank all the people from the MyCoff community. Yeah, I saw some really great tweets afterwards. It seemed like it was a really good coming together of two different communities and sharing ideas.

That's great. Look what the love plug's becoming, man. That's so awesome. I love to see that. It happens every Sunday. And, you know, every now and then we crash a live party. Do you guys have plans this Sunday if we were to crash? Would we interrupt anything?

Well, it will be a normal look-look, but if you are recording afterwards, I guess the whole community will join the show. Heck yeah. That's great. If you'd like to join the conversation in between episodes or catch up with some of the hosts on the network, join our Telegram at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. And also, the Jupiter Garage sale remains.

A few swag bags are left, but more importantly, it's the very, very last of the Linux Unplugged 400 beer postcards. I've been including a personalized message and a postcard with our LUP 400 CNX Tuesday beer on there. In every rando retro swag bag order, we slip one of those in, and there is just a small handful left. So you've been thinking about getting some retro swag, and you'd like to get one of those LUP 400 limited keepsake postcards. Well, jupitergarage.com now. They go really quick. So go grab one if you'd like one, because I think they're pretty neat, and we're not doing them again after this. So it's a limited time to get that LUP400 postcard. And that is the housekeeping.

So this last week, we really kind of saw Nitrix pop up on our radar for a reason that isn't typical. This is a distribution that we want to talk about today. It's really kind of something special, and we were pretty impressed when we jumped in there. But unfortunately, the reason why it was on our radar is kind of a negative one. They published an open letter to DistroWatch stating, amongst other things, that for the better part of three years, they've remained silent about ongoing efforts at DistroWatch to affect people's perception of their Linux distribution.

They go on to say they've tried their best not to engage with DistroWatch's hostility and their disregard to inform viewers and listeners, and they've also tried to reach out and correct facts when mistakes were made. Going through the blog of the lead developer of the distribution and reading their open letter, you know, it seems like they've had a real struggle with DistroWatch and a lack of exposure there. And when DistroWatch has reviewed Nitrix,

it seems like they've made numerous, somewhat obvious mistakes that have been very upsetting to the distribution. And I normally wouldn't talk even about something like this, because we can't really speak to their particular experiences. Right. We don't make the distro this because we can't really speak to their particular experiences. Right. We don't make the distro and we didn't do those reviews.

Yeah. My personal experiences with DistroWatch does sort of lead me to believe their accusations as kind of out there as they are and as intense as they are. My personal experience, having experienced some, I would say, hostilities from DistroWatch, it would kind of line up with what they're seeing. So they may actually be onto something, and we thought, well, what could we do? We could do our part and help them get a little exposure here, because you can look at this distribution today, and you can see it's really likely going somewhere if the developers can stick with it. And Nitrix 1.40 was released on May 2nd of this year. It's based on Debian SID and a little bit of Neon in there, it seems. And well, it's really kind of a mix of a lot of

Debian-based systems, but it's really rocking a few special components, like a hyper-modern plasma on top of a Debian base. That was enough to get my attention. But then as we dug into the distribution, we found a lot of surprising things. Yeah, we really did. And that's where I can maybe understand some of the mistakes on the distro watch side or some of their issues understanding Nitrix. Because really, Nitrix has had a long and complicated history. And there's a lot going on in the project.

I mean, there's a lot of new or original takes on ideas. And there's just a lot of changes they've made. Like in the past, they were really targeting snaps, but these days, it's now all about app images. Very much so. The app image integration is so slick. It is like I've never really, I guess I don't use app images a lot.

So it's neat to see a distribution kind of focus on app image because it gives me an opportunity to experience at the same level of integration I've experienced snaps and flatpaks. You flatpack floozy, you. I do love me some Flathub. But you know what? It was great to go check out AppImage Hub for once and download a few

AppImages. And Nitrix impressed the hell out of me because you download an AppImage, just the action of downloading the son of a gun, not launching it, not having to install nothing. You just download the app image and the system indexes it and adds it to your launcher immediately, pretty much. And so you just do nothing. It's a very different sort of workflow and mindset from a traditional Linux distribution, where everything's sort of sprawled out all over your file system and your package manager has this, you know, detailed little

index and database that keeps it. Oh, this package owns these files and I've done them here and here's the state that they're in. And Nitrix and a lot of what they've been working on and by targeting app images, it's almost more like macOS, but the old days of macOS where you have things, you know, more self-contained, I can just download the stuff, stick it on my thing, move it to another machine, and it just works. It was really pretty surprising. You go to, like, do a whole bunch of extra work, and all of a sudden you discover it's just there and already done. And you have that kind of, oh, wow, that was so easy, I expected it to be harder moment, is what you basically have.

And I'm really impressed by that. But here's the thing that you realize after using it for a little bit. And we didn't get like a ton of time with it, but we had enough time to realize this is an opinionated desktop here. And not too surprising because you could trace the roots of this distribution back to a theme where somebody was very opinionated

about how things should look and how icons in the Breeze theme should look. And you move forward now to a desktop distribution that has brought that same opinionated design and thinking forward. And you end up with something that's like no other plasma desktop. It has a top bar. It does the integrated top bar thing. When you maximize your windows, your maximize and minimize buttons go up under the top bar, but it also has a dock and it has its own custom set of apps using MAUIKit that enables things to be more convergent.

You can resize them. They have a whole suite of applications that they've brought to the desktop that are unique. Yeah, things like Station, a terminal emulation app with tabs, vertical and horizontal splitting, and some nice features

that maybe you wouldn't take advantage of on your regular Linux desktop. But if you were in a convergent situation, they've got things like handy buttons if you want to send a tab or a control, as well as easy ways to do copy and paste, which, hey, honestly, that's just kind of nice anytime in the terminal. Yeah, if you've ever used like a mobile app terminal emulator that adds some of the common buttons to the bottom,

their terminal emulator does something similar. They have a video player app that they've built. They have a music collection manager. And probably the most pronounced application you're going to use is Index, which is their own file manager with an embedded terminal, split views, file previews, experimental web dev support, tags, support for files.

And it's all, it's a QT app. It's just a little bit different. It's not Dolphin. It's its own thing. And it's really well done. And it works really quick. It's very smooth. And you come away with this almost, I hate to say it, but it's true, almost elementary OS type experience.

Maybe not quite as refined yet. And it's using Qt and Plasma technologies instead of GNOME, Shell and GTK and Pantheon. But it is a curated Qt environment with their own apps that have a surprising amount of functionality and yet a simplicity to their layout and also a common design language to their layout. Yeah, that's just it, sort of the integration, the holistic approach to the whole desktop experience. Obviously, there's a ton of differences, but in those aspects, you're right, it does kind of remind me of elementary, or almost also kind of of the very early days of Solus, you know, because experimenting with different package management scenarios,

different ways to lay out the Linux file system, that's a lot of what I like about Nitrex, because I think we sort of debate in the community of like what are the value of these sort of one-off small-time distros. But to my mind, some of that value really is in experimenting and figuring out like, are there better ways that we should be doing that?

Even if this isn't what you end up using on your enterprise desktop, it might inform the future versions down the road. Yeah, I think it is a solid contender for somebody who just wants a modern Debian workstation. And really, they're pulling in aspects like the Plasma stuff from Neon. So you're getting a really super, super current Neon. And like Pycrash is pointing out in the chat room, some of these apps, some of these convergent apps are making their way into the Manjaro KDE mobile spin.

So you can actually use some of these same powerful desktop apps in a mobile UI. And, you know, as Wes and I were talking about this before the show and we were looking at these apps, we started thinking, you know, maybe this isn't such a bad idea. You come to love a desktop application, like say Noda, which is their text editor with syntax highlighting and focus mode.

It looks like a really nice text editor. Maybe you come to love Noda and now you could take that same exact application and you could just resize it and run it on a mobile device. And there might actually be something to that there. I like the idea at least. This MAUI kit works with, what is it, Kirigami?

Isn't that what it is, Wes? Yeah, MAUI kit and then Kirigami as well under the hood there. Yeah. And that technology stack isn't like something they've just invented on their own, but they've brought in their own special sauce with MAUI kit. But it's, you know, it's cute. It looks like a cute application. It's not going to be some weird toolkit you've never seen or something.

It's going to look totally normal. No, but it does seem like there's a lot of nice features. You know, you get a little bit of a higher level. You get more aspects of things that help you keep things convergent, but also just, you know, helpers that you might need when you're making any app. At least if you listen to Yuri Harara, the lead dev, he's done several interviews. You can find some stuff linked in the show notes.

It really sounds like, you know, much like elementary folks have focused somewhat on the developer experience, you know, much like elementary folks have focused somewhat on the developer experience, you know, with things like Vala. That's happening over here too, aiming to have something that's a pleasant experience to write yourself a Linux desktop application. Right, yeah, yeah.

Another good comparison there to elementary OS. I think it's also, this is a distro for anyone who is currently a KDE Neon user to consider because you're getting very, very, very fresh Plasma, Plasma 521.5 running on Wayland, and they're pulling the packages from Neon. So you get something that's a little more curated, a little more polished, a little more like, yes, we know you're using this as a daily driver, but with the fresh packages. But they do something a little different. And this is, again, where when you see people out there like DistroWatch who claim it's

Ubuntu-based, they're totally missing the mark because this system does not use Systemd. What? Dun, dun, dun. Yeah, they use OpenRC. And I don't even think I noticed for the first couple of days. I think you had to say something before I went and looked. Yeah, I mean, if you're not looking at the boot screen, because by default they've got a nice, you know, sort of visual splash boot,

you won't notice. I only started to notice when I went to go try to make some changes to the system as I do, and I was like, oh, wait. System D isn't here. How do I change things? You know what? Somehow the world didn't come crashing down to an end. Somehow I just got on using the distro just fine.

No, right? I mean, otherwise it's a super modern Plasma. It's running on Wayland. It's a really slick setup and theme on Plasma. Like in every other respect, it feels super modern. And it's interesting living in a parallel universe that still just works. I mean, maybe there are some nitty gritty details down the line or system D features you might miss, but it's nice to see this all fleshed out. Yeah. And you get a very,

at the end of the day, a very opinionated Plasma setup with that, like we said, with that global menu, that top bar based on Wayland, they use the Nitrix theme, obviously, out of the box. And it's one of those distros that when you log into it for the first time, you immediately go, oh, this is different. It's one of those immediate kind of things. It's not like, oh, let's go. It's like, oh. And then you begin to use it and you realize it's even more different than you realize but in positive ways that are fun improvements in a way that I haven't seen in a while. So go for it, I say.

I think this is a great distribution. And it's a shame maybe it hasn't gotten the recognition that it should. They also offer minimal images if that's how you roll with i3, if that's your style. Yeah, I think that's pretty new. They're also, with that minimal image, they're offering other ways to install different desktop environments on top here. They do note that they really are, you know, focused on the MAUI stuff and Plasma, but if you want to keep the underlying base system and have something different on top, that's now supported in the latest release. You know, Wes, I'm curious what your thoughts were

about the app image-based workflow for getting new applications installed. How did that appeal to you? Because that was something for me that was like, oh, okay, I got to wrap my head around a different way of loading apps. I mean, I can use Apt, but this is clearly kind of the direction they want us to go.

It is, you know, I found it a little confused. On the one hand, I can use apt, but this is clearly kind of the direction they want us to go. It is, you know, I found it a little confused. On the one hand, like you're mentioning, there are some really nice integrations, but on the whole, I had a little bit of trouble.

And admittedly, this definitely shows from us only recently having started to play with this. You know, this is a first take at Nitrix. But because there's so many different takes and new ideas involved, it felt like there

were multiple different transitionings happening. I'd find some mentions of systems or ways of doing things in the docs that didn't seem to be the case. Or for instance, there's a set of additional app images that you can have and that are mentioned as part of what makes Nitrix interesting, but they're not currently installed by default. so I had to go find an app package that I think under the hood just went and downloaded all these app images. Almost reminded me of the Snap situation in the Ubuntu world.

So I wasn't quite sure, because I got, you know, I didn't have an app image store by default. I had Discover and the normal system. So I wasn't really sure which direction I was being pushed. I had that similar experience, and I think when the NX software store is sort of shipping by default, it'll be a really nice portal

to get access to all the stuff. And that's going to be a little more clear. There's things that are just slightly different. It's not really Plasma. It's the NX desktop, which is based on Plasma technologies and looks an awful lot like Plasma. But there's things that are slightly different

and I would argue perhaps better. I sure do prefer the way they handle menu bar icons and notifications and that kind of stuff. I think it's pretty good. The notifications especially really slick. Yeah. And it's a real, you know, it's, it is a really kind of close to plasma experience, but not, not quite plasma. And so there is a little bit of this, am I in an alternative reality? Cause I'm using Debian, but it doesn't quite feel like Debian. am I in an alternative reality? Because I'm using Debian, but it doesn't quite feel like Debian.

I'm installing app images, but it's not quite what I expected. But at the end, it was all a very positive experience. And I felt like we had kind of missed that something kind of special was happening over here. Because if you take this where they're at right now, if you take this out another year, where their software center is shipping in there and some of those other app images are installed by default and some of these things have been just even slightly more refined by a team that seems to have a strong opinion and be executing really well on it. When you zoom that out, what you're going to find is something that makes for a very special distribution. And I think at the end of the day, its unique value is going to be very modern desktop on a Debian base. You don't have to worry about distro politics. You don't have to worry about what Fedora's doing or Ubuntu's doing.

It's just good old, reliable Debian. And that's appealing. Yeah, and that means things just work, right? Like, I needed to get Slack installed, unfortunately, but I did, and I didn't have time to fuss with, okay, is there a community person who's packaging an app image? Like, I could just download the regular old dev off their website, unfortunate as that may be, and get it working because it still had those hooks of a traditional system. And then when I started using their custom apps like Station, which is their terminal

emulation app, my first reaction was, oh, well, why not Console? Console's great. I love Console. But yeah, I started using it, and I started appreciating things that they've added and the consistency of the applications. And the way all these technologies work anyways, they're all built on top of each other regardless. It's not like it's some crazy foreign thing. And each app, as I started using it, like Index, the file manager, or Shelf, the document viewer, as I started using each one of these applications, I got more and more used to them, and I didn't have that typical reaction that I have, which is, oh, great, another File Manager.

Just what we needed. I was impressed with that, too. It was surprising how low friction it was to switch, you know, because, I mean, especially I use a Plasma desktop all the time, so it was like, okay, I'm already used to console, like, what am I going to have to do here? But no, it was no problems. I could do all of my regular So it was like, okay, I'm already used to console. Like, I don't know what am I going to have to do here? But no, it was no problems. I could do all of my regular workflows

that support, you know, things like tabs, all the normal stuff, like just no issues. Yeah. So I think it's a big recommend for Nitrix 1.4.0 here on this show. Pretty, pretty fresh release. Just released like 10 days ago as we recorded nine days ago.

We'll have some links in the notes. There's a lot more to this. There is probably a three episode you could probably do a three episode series just on this one distribution alone. So we'll try to cover some additional bases by putting some links in the show notes for you to go check out and head over to their website

to get Nitrix which is nxos.org Yeah, go over there and grab that and give it a spin. I think you're going to be pretty dang impressed. And hey, maybe send us some feedback, you Nitrix users out there, because I'm sure there are details and great things about it that we've missed, or maybe some possible issues.

MailRoute.net slash Linux. Try out MailRoute today and get 10% off the lifetime of your account and start with a 30-day free trial and no credit card required. MailRoute is how we're doing our mail protection for our new Jupiter Colony mail server. And for 24 years, MailRoute has focused on its core competence, providing cutting-edge email security. MailRoute protects your email server with a suite of services designed to remove spam and viruses and, honestly, prevent awful, horrible, debilitating downtime. And, you know, I got to be honest, sometimes it's tricky with an ISP that blocks certain ports because they're jerks or maybe you ended up on a blacklist for some stupid reason.

MailerOut solves all kinds of problems like that, too. And, you know, admins, it's also very, very, very nice to be able to queue up mail externally. So that way you have time for maintenance and downtime. That was a number one priority for us because there's going to be times for the show that we're going to want to upgrade our system. And MailRoute will queue up messages for us. And then when our mail server comes back online and the servers can start talking again, MailRoute just conveniently delivers all the email like nothing ever happened, no big deal. And it's great for compliance too. If you work in government

and you have certain compliance that you have to follow, MailRoute's going to do that. In fact, MailRoute's one of the few ways to do that. It's super easy to switch as well. They have one-click migrations for both Office 365 and G Suite users. And realistically, it's so straightforward. You set up your MX records to point to MailRoute,

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All right, Wes, we have some feedback. Last week, we asked for Slexi alternatives, which is what we used for Pastebin, and Ben wrote in. You mentioned in your last episode that you're looking for a self-hosted Pastebin or GitHub GIST alternative. I've had a ton of luck with Privatebin, which has first-class container support and has been excellent for me.

And then, of course, thanks, Ben. He linked us right to their Docker Nginx FPM Alpine image, so that's handy. That is. We've got a couple of recommendations for Private Ben. So that seems like one we should go. We had an email in for the security conscious out there. I repeatedly recommend a Pastebin alternative called Dfuse. Dfuse.ca, which is a pre-internet encryption for text, they say. It's Pi. Pi. Pre-internet encryption text. That's pretty nice.

And then David wrote in with CryptPad.fr, an end-to-end encrypted collaborative, AGPL3 self-hostable pastebin alternative called CryptPad. Yeah, you know, David's actually a member of the CryptPad team, and it might be a little more than we need, but boy, is it fancy. I mean, it's almost a whole online document solution. They've got a CryptDrive.

They've got fancy syntax highlighting support for various programming languages in there. I only had time to give it a cursory review when I was going through the mail, but boy, CryptPad looks nice. Zach writes in with a tough one. He says, I'm a network engineer, but I hate it. Having never worked on Linux in a professional capacity, how do I make the career switch to a Linux administrator? I know some Ansible automation for networking, so is that transferable?

What other skills could I transfer as a Fedora Linux gamer to an actual career? Zach. Well, it sounds like you're honestly in a pretty good start already. Clearly, you're interested in Linux. You're using Fedora, so you're keeping up with the latest and greatest in Linux technologies. Maybe you're not engaging with them, but they're

there under the hood and available for you to play with. Plus, you've already got networking knowledge, which is a big win. And let me tell you, there are a ton of developers and system administrators out there whose networking chops are not quite up to snuff. So I think if you can get your foot in the door, those will be assets. Knowing Ansible and for automation, that's also going to be huge. I think you just need to develop some experience, be able to talk through things. You've already got work experience, that's

on your side too, so set up some home lab stuff. Set up some stuff in the cloud, play more with automating more than networking, setting up various systems, maybe with virtual machines, start playing with containers if that's the kind of work that you might want to get into, target that, and I think your experience with professional systems already

will really help you out. I completely agree. You know, Zach, something else you could consider is joining the self-hosted Discord server. You'll probably get a few project ideas in our Discord for self-hosted. Of course, you could always skim that show and see if any of our topics give you an idea

for something to build. Getting hands-on with something really just is a, it's like an invaluable opportunity to learn. You can read about stuff. You can watch YouTube videos and visualize stuff, but really going hands-on

makes all the difference and makes it possible for you to speak confidently about stuff and describe things in simpler terms, which is going to do well in an interview. That's just it. makes all the difference and makes it possible for you to speak confidently about stuff and describe things in simpler terms, which is going to do well in an interview. That's just it. Because, I mean, you likely already have troubleshooting experience, which is a huge part of the job of a system administrator.

You just need those concrete examples of like, oh, hey, you know, this isn't working. I can't make a network connection. Oh, it's because IP tables, you know, it's a different syntax, different subsystem. But the process is basically the same. And you learn that it's always S tables, you know, it's a different syntax, different subsystem, but the process is basically the same. And you learn that it's always SELinux, actually. It's always because of SELinux. That's really what you learn, and that's invaluable. Yeah, just turn that off right from the get-go.

Also, Zach, you always want to be logged in as root and do everything as root, including browse the web with your web browser as root. And don't bother updating either. Keep that stuff. Once you get it set up and working, never touch it ever. You know what we could do? We could basically tell Zach how to become a Linux expert by just

telling him all the things he should never, ever do. Also, when you're at a coffee shop with your laptop, be sure you walk away with your laptop screen unlocked and fully logged in as root for extended periods of time without keeping an eye on it. That's a great idea. Ideally, SSH and do a few of your key servers.

Yeah, make sure they're left up on the screen and easy to identify. Bill writes in, and he has a real good long question, Wes. And I'm kind of tempted to say we should keep this for our AMA episode. This could be one of our first questions in the AMA episode. I think you might just be on to something. So, Bill, if you know your email, you know the stumper you wrote in, so be sure to check into the AMA episode. And everybody else, go to asklupp.com to help us fill out our AMA episode.

We do have some pickage before we get out of here, and I wanted to talk about an oldie but a goodie. And it's a real oldie, but it's still a real goodie. And that is TLP, the project that helps you optimize your Linux laptop battery life. Yep, it's still around and it's still useful. Friends, gather around and let me tell you a tale of woe.

Stay a while and listen. So you know I've got this X1 Carbon, the Fedora Edition. Nice little laptop. That's your shiny new rig, right? It is a Fedora 34 machine, Wes. Love it for that. I wanted to keep my battery as healthy as possible. I think maybe I overthink battery health in general for all my devices.

I don't know about any other dads out there, but I'm the battery guy. I'm like making sure all the devices are always charged in the family, plugging in tablets and devices constantly. And I unplug things when they've been plugged in for too long. So that way you're not, you know, wearing the battery out because with lithium ion batteries, when they hold at a hundred percent charge, it's kind of like keeping a muscle fully flexed all the time. It, It's actually not super great for them. They do better, you know, between 40% and 80% range. And I like to keep mine between the 40% and 60% range state of charge,

unless I'm planning to use them for something heavy where I'll charge them all the way up. So picky, these devices. And then, you know what, even with that, Wes, sometimes I'll even do like a full cycle regime. Like, you know, if I'm keeping a battery, say it's 60% on average, about once a month, I'll do a full all the way down to zero, back up to 100 kind of cycle as well. Trying to keep them, you know, in prime shape. So that's why you're so busy. It's mostly just maintaining batteries behind the scenes. Yeah, I'm in a lot of battery debt right now, I got to say. But so I took the old X1 Carbon out and I installed TLP, which Fedora has some great documentation on specifically for enabling support for

ACP IP aspects that are unique to ThinkPad. So you can get really good data for your ThinkPad laptop. I install all this. I'll have links in the show notes for that. And I do a TLP report to get my battery health. Now, mind you, I mean, what is this X1 Carbon, Wes? Is it like three months old, four months old? Can't be much more than that. Maybe six months at most. Yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, it's not that old.

Maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's six months. But I get the battery report back and it says my battery health is down to 94% on this brand new laptop. And I know different, different batteries and different machines age different rates, but this is, this is the worst I've ever had on any laptop. I've never had a laptop within a couple of months already be below 95% or something. I mean, it's just outrageous. I've got laptops from 2017 that are maybe at like 86% battery health still. Like they've declined at a much slower rate.

I was actually upset about this because I am very justidious about battery health. And so to have a 94% battery health on a brand new device, it was outrageous. Yeah, already. I mean, it's just going to make you worried about how long is this thing going to last. And surely that battery is soldered in there.

So what can you even do about it? Right. And I want this thing to last forever. You know, I'd love to use this thing until the wheels fall off, basically. So that's where TLP is going to help me out. One of the options when you go through this really long etsytlp.com type config, One of the options when you go through this really long etcetlp.com type config, but it's very simple, very well documented with the comments just in line. There is a section in there, and I'm going to do this for a while.

So feel free to check back in with me and ask me how it's working if you want to do this for your laptop out there. But I'm sticking this thing to limit the charge to 60% for now. And the way you can configure it is you can say charging kicks in when the battery reaches 55% and charging discontinues when the battery reaches 60%. And so then the battery just kind of fluctuates between this 5% range. When it reaches the bottom of that range, it starts charging. When it reaches the top of that range, it stops charging. And then you can go in there and turn this off and let it completely cycle. And that's going to be, it's a little manual at the moment, but that's going to be my approach

with this laptop going forward. Because I think perhaps what had happened is I committed that 100% sin too many times, where I got the laptop all set up, because it's often my work from home machine. I got everything all set up on my arm and my external monitor and my external eGPU. And I just left everything plugged in. And I think that's sort of what brought this on. Ah, yeah. It's not always easy to have time to unplug it too, right? I mean, you got to remember, sometimes you actually do just need it to work for multiple

hours at a time. So it can be difficult. Yeah. I don't want to think about it, Wes. You know, I got other stuff to do. So this will just automate it for me. Even when it's plugged into AC power, it'll stop charging at 60% now. Now, the trick is to remember that if I need this thing out and about for like a day or so,

I have to remember to disable this first before I take it off the charger. Right. Before you leave, remember, okay, I got to undo this, let it charge all the way up. Is that easy? Do you have to go change the config? Is there like a mode you can change it to? I think, I haven't really, I mean, there is for everything else in TLP, but I don't really see it for this option. So that is a little, that is a little confusing. I'll have to watch that and see if like you can do it in different modes. The orange ones, you just got, you just got yourself a ThinkPad.

Have you installed this? Have you taken a look at what your battery health is? I have TLP installed. I've got to say the very depressing thing that it's not actually running on the machine, which sucks. But I mean, definitely after this, I'm going to have a play around.

I've seen the TLP conf. It's absolutely huge. It is. So I'm definitely going to be playing around with this for the next couple of days. In part, it's so big, though, because it's documented so well, and there's a lot of just documentation via comments in line in the config file.

The orange one, if you want to check your battery health right now, you can do sudo tlp-stat space tacb. So that's tlp-stat space tacb, and you have to do it with pseudo privileges. And then that'll tell you, you just have to have it installed, and that'll tell you the health of your battery. I'm given lots of numbers. Any idea which one it is? Well, what you should see come back is what your current charge is and what your capacity percentage is. Oh yeah, I'm at 96.6. And your machine's from February, so your battery's at 96% of its original capacity. Yeah, that's depressing. I mean, like it does spend, given it's my work

machine, so working from home, it spends all of its life plugged into a Type-C monitor, but that's not great. I think they lose a bit almost immediately. So it's just the way lithium ion batteries work, but it's different for each battery. So it's just the way lithium-ion batteries work. But it's different for each battery, so it's hard to say how that one's manufactured and whatnot. But yeah, there's also TLPUI, which is a GTK interface for TLP that's written in Python. And I think that'll give you this information as well. And we'll have that linked in the show notes for those of you that want to try it out and get the bad news about your battery. The nice thing about the TLPUI, though, is it lets you go through a lot of that huge config

with a graphical front end, which, you know, that might have been a better way to go through it, honestly, because maybe it'd give me more kind of idea of what it does. So we'll have links to all that in there. Although I'm not sure if it'll have all the nitty gritty for each of the niche features, because what, while most of TLP is not ThinkPad only, this stuff is, right? It's dependent on your ACPI extension. So there's ThinkPad ones, there's a couple of different ones, and then that's how it reads all the smart battery information.

ThinkPads are the easiest, I think. Right, well, because my understanding was there's some tools out there for Asus and Huawei as well, but I don't think TLP currently integrates with those, unfortunately. Oh, maybe not, okay. Separate commands then? Yeah, I think they have some of their own helpers because they've got the details provided by the firmware and the hooks necessary, but they're not talking the same language.

Oh, man. 94% just outrageous. Just outrageous for a brand new machine. Now I'm going to be checking all the time. But it was really nice to see, you know, TLP is just a great idea. And it's one of those things that I suspect if there could have been an alternative reality where vendors kept bundling this and pre-setting it up and integrating it like with their laptops and whatnot. Because it does make your battery last longer. We've talked about it before on the show, and it still holds up.

It's still a solid pick. There you go. Somebody think of the children or batteries. Children's batteries, yeah. UnpluggedCore.com, that's where you become a member. Thank you to everybody who supports the show over there. You did get a special note

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Get the full live stream, all our screw-ups, all the stuff that never makes it into the show, the conversations that probably should have made it into the show, but we weren't recording properly yet. All of screw-ups, all the stuff that never makes it into the show, the conversations that probably should have made into the show, but we weren't recording properly yet, all of that is in that second feed. And you get access to it, either one, as a thank you. Or I suppose both. If you're a maniac, you know,

like Wes Payne over there. That's the kind of maniac Wes Payne is. I'll just take all the feeds. I don't discriminate. That's right. Thank you to our sponsor, CloudGuru2. You can go find them on social media. It's pretty simple. They're just slash A Cloud Guru everywhere. And you'll find them.

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If you work in the tech industry, do not miss Linux Action News. Every Monday morning, Wes and I break down everything that matters in the world of Linux. And it's a great way to get informed on your way into the office. And we do our best to make sure we get the details, that we do the research to make sure

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That's right. You can join this show live. We keep the Linux rolling on Tuesdays. Join us at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Show up and chat with Wes and I, or join our Mumble Room and chat with the entire world. And links to everything

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Dan wrote into the show this is really the most important email of the day but you know just made it in the post show Titles, let's go boat. One last email, though. Dan wrote into the show. This is really the most important email of the day. But, you know, just made it in the post show. Texas tendies. That's the subject. So you can tell already this is a high priority email. He says there's also Chicken Express.

You guys were talking about chicken restaurants last week. But didn't mention Chicken Express. It's not nearly on the level of Babes or Cane's, but I'm just so happy to hear the proper homage paid to the heartland of chicken. Thank you, Dan. I did forget about Chicken Express. I just, I think a good chicken strip is a piece of art, but you know what a good chicken strip needs, Wes? A good dipping sauce. That's right. Nothing like a great honey mustard or like a house sauce. It's special just to that shop, you know, that place, that restaurant.

Oh, man. That's quintessential American eating right there.