LINUX Unplugged - 422: The Fun Distro

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

We try out what might be the most fun Linux distribution around. It started as a laugh, but now we’re in love. Plus, the reunion road trip hits a bump, some community news, feedback, picks, and more. Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

So they say it's a phone that's designed so you don't use it. It's called the Light Phone, and Brent has his hands on a minimal phone with a neat trick. It's got an e-ink display. I do, and I must say, this phone fits the hand so well. If you remember the original iPhone, it's kind of like, it's a bit smaller than that, actually. It's beautiful, and light would be accurate. It doesn't weigh hardly anything. But this phone is really neat. It's beautiful and light would be accurate. It doesn't weigh hardly anything. But this phone is really neat. It's simplistic. So you have to be sort of up for that. And I'm

struggling here to get the screen on. There we go. Is it slow with E-Ink? Does it take a second or two for things to update? I think if you're used to a modern phone, I would call this like a meditative phone because you have to give it a moment to react to anything you do, but it gives you, you know, that split second to think about your life choices. Does it have apps? Does it do maps? Okay. Let's call them apps, but it does do things. So here we go. I'm pulling up the menu, which takes, it kind of like flashes between menus to clear the screen. That's the kind of E-Ink perk, I suppose. Well, yeah. The mark of E-Ink is it updates, yeah.

Implementation detail, perhaps. Right. I was kind of surprised because the screen is simplistic, but easy enough to read in like full sunshine and stuff like that. So that was impressive. You asked about apps. So I've brought up the apps menu, which when I got my hands on this, it only had three apps, which was phone, alarm and calculator. However, we've discovered that there are many more apps to add, which includes directions, which is very exciting. And I'll talk about in a moment. It does have a music app. That seems essential. It also has, Chris, podcasts, which I haven't tried yet. You haven't tried that? Come on. How did you not listen to a Linux unplugged first thing you did? I know. I'm sorry. I've disappointed you all. So Heather and I tried the directions because we thought, holy gee, that seems pretty advanced for such a simplistic device. And there are kind of two views. Actually,

it found the addresses of like the local Home Depot we were trying to get to very quickly. So I don't know what the underpinning is, whether it's open street maps or if it's actually just Google in the back. Maybe some handy listener can let us know. But it did really well. You have to expect that it's of this light phone sort of design. So the map itself is kind of like, imagine Pong, but it's trying to tell you where to go. So very simplistic lines and things, and it's kind of delayed a little bit, which is not that helpful if you're driving. However, if you're hiking or something, I imagine that'd be perfect. But we used the text instructions and it was perfect.

Got us there. So I would say if you're looking for a phone that is trying to keep you disconnected, this is pretty good. And it also has hotspots. So if you want to carry your real phone around, you could do that too. It definitely seems like it has a more simplified UI and they kind of brag about it not having social media. From what I can find online, LiteOS, all they really say is it's built with React. So I'm not quite sure the details on the underpinnings of it. But it also seems like they're picking up the bill for the cost to run those maps right now.

Wow, that is something. That's impressive. I would say that's probably a feature that a lot of users were asking for. And if you're trying to get around with this, that I think is, it's there, it's there. So that sounds really quite amazing. The battery, I think if you're not using maps and you're not using the hotspot and it lasts quite a long time, but it certainly doesn't if you're using those, let's say advanced functions. You would hope that E-ink screen would mean that it has like

a week long battery life or something like that. But it sounds like it's a kind of standard battery life if you're using sort of standard smartphone features. Yeah, exactly. But that being said, I'm sure the battery in this is a fraction of the size. So pretty neat phone. There you go. It's the Light Phone 2. We'll have a link in the show notes.

It looks like it's about $299 if you buy the North American model. And there's a preorder with the next plan to ship mid-October. I haven't seen it yet, but I saw pictures on their website, and I think Bren's description of the original iPhone, that size, maybe slightly smaller screen, that's about right. So there you go, Wes. Time to get rid of your Pixel and get yourself a light phone. Uh-oh. cloud Linux and modern tech skills training platform with hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified, get hired, get learning at acloudguru.com. Well, coming up on the show today, about a month ago, I switched to a new daily driver Linux distro and I didn't say anything. Didn't want to mention it on the show. I just thought it would be honestly a fading thing that I just thought would, a fling, a Linux fling, if you will.

But then I started to realize, you know, there's an important place for fun in the Linux distro world. And I want to share a little diamond in the rough. I even talked Wes into giving it a go and trying it out. We're going to tell you all about that later today and maybe even have a conversation about the place for fun Linux distributions in the overall ecosystem. So welcome in. And before we get to any of that, I have got to say time-appropriate greetings to our Mumble Room.

Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello, Chris. Hello, Chris. Namaskaram. Hello. Hello. Thank you for being here, everybody. Yeah, we're going to need your support today. Yes, it does.

It feels like it's an episode where we're going to need people's support. So we do have chapter markers. So I'm going to give you everybody a brief update on the reunion road trip. But if you just want to get to the Linux stuff, hit the chapter. But since our last episode, since we gathered together last time, my slides that I've talked about before on the show have been fixed. Thankfully, it's great. Very happy. Working really good.

The shop doesn't necessarily want me to give them publicity about it yet because they're still in the R&D phase. But when they do, I'm going to be telling people about it because life changer for us. And for a solid 15 minutes, I felt like Lady Joops was in the best shape of her life. And I felt amazing that my home, here it is six years old, was better than ever. Like I, I felt on fire. It was just great and not in a bad way. About 15 minutes later, though, I experienced extreme disappointment as I discovered a major issue with Lady Joop's, my RV. While pulling out of the shop that fixed our slides, I literally discovered the next devastating issue. I didn't even make it 15 minutes with the victory. It was just awful.

So I had to park it again. Our rear driver's side had a supposedly indestructible sumo spring that was ripped away from its top mount, causing the spring to fall over onto our inner dually tire. I can only presume because I apparently decided to take a tour of America's worst roads and between Colorado, parts of New Mexico, which parts of New Mexico are a lot better, but some parts of New Mexico are not, and Arizona, which is a hell-failed state, has the worst roads probably in the country. I can only imagine because there are just entire sections of the road that are missing. So you literally can't have worse roads because there

are parts where there are no road. Did you take a piece of the road as a souvenir for your trip? I hope I took a piece of the RV as a souvenir. That's what happened is that driving around and all that stuff. It was, it was really damaging. And when that spring fell onto our tire, it's there for a while. There's significant rub damage on the spring. So I don't know what the condition of that tire is. And a blowout there could be extremely, extremely dangerous. So I determined it was just too dangerous to drive with a broken rear suspension and a tire that had been significantly rubbed. I got the okay from the shop and I never even got to leave their parking lot. No hookups either, of course. And this was the Friday before the long Labor Day weekend,

about 3 p.m. and all of Tucson had already shut down. No shops, no techs, no parts departments, nobody was answering the phone. You're just stranded. Totally stranded, dude. Totally stranded on a Friday when we had been intending not only to be driving the entire weekend, but I had an event that I was going to where I wanted to potentially meet two new potential hosts on the network for a show that we were considering doing. And I wanted to have an in-person meeting with them to kind of suss them out and talk to them and see where they're at and really get a feel for it. And now that's not happening. So this has an impact on my business too. So we get stuck here the Friday

before Labor Day weekend. We check Amazon. They've got these sumo springs, but they're a weekend change out like into next week. And we just spent the weekend roasting in 105 degrees. Most, most days about 105. The sun from sunrise to sunset was beating down on Lady Jupes. When I was doing LAN on Saturday evening, it got up to 122 degrees inside Lady Jupes. It's crazy, right? Because it's a hot car in the sun. And when you turn off any kind of airflow, it just heats up in here like crazy.

And we're constantly managing the generator temperature and the inverter temperature and the battery temperatures because everything's working at its max to try to generate enough power to run air conditioning, which causes everything to overheat. And when it's 105 degrees outside and the sun is beating down on the bays that contain your electrical system, it's an impossible, impossible battle. The food in our cupboards started to go bad, like cleaning sprays started to separate and get gross. Up front where I'm recording, there's the smell of burning plastic. It starts around 10 a.m. and lasts all day, just the smell of plastic burning. I mean, we are literally baking our RV

and ourselves and Levi in this parking lot. So we knew we needed to attempt a fix. Even if nobody was available, nobody could help us. We knew we had to do something because we are dying here. I mean, I'm literally getting heat stroke like every day. When I record, I get heat stroke because as I record like this show right now, it'll get up to 120, 130 degrees in here. It's absolutely mental. It is inhospitable to human life. Man was arrogant to ever build in Tucson. So we decided to try to do something.

And, you know, we're from Seattle. We're used to 70s. I mean, Wes, what's the temperature right now? It's the beginning of September. What's the weather outside? Ooh, checking the weather report. It's 72 and partly cloudy today. Oh, oh yeah, 72, right? So you can see like here I am, September, it's 105 degrees. The sun is beating down directly on the spot where our tire and our suspension is. We can only be crawling around on the ground, doing stuff down there for like 10 minutes at a time and then we're dying. So what we realized is we got to get out here

like 5 a.m., 6 a.m. when it's only like 85 degrees Fahrenheit. And I took a pass at it and I went inside and Hadiyah went out, my wife, she took a pass at it and she managed to hook the suspension up. She hooked the sumo spring up using bungee cords. So it was hanging in place. At least it wasn't touching the tire anymore.

And we thought, okay, we can make it 10 minutes down the road where we'd seen an RV park. We could test this. We can make sure it's working before we go. This is going to work out. Okay. This is about Sunday. This is Sunday. Wes and I recorded Saturday. So that way I could use Sunday to try to fix this for Linux action news. And Sunday rolls around midday. We're feeling pretty good. We're ready to test it. And the first alert, you know, when you get like the, the Amber alert on your phone and it buzzes and stuff, the first one comes in severe thunderstorm alert. Okay. All right. That sounds bad. The next one, major hailstorm, massive property damage from these giant hail balls stay inside. I'm like, oh God, that's going to like probably destroy our solar panels.

Then about 20 minutes later, maybe 15 minutes, we get a dust storm alert instructing everyone to remain indoors, not to travel and to take shelter. I'm like, geez, a dust storm too. And then about 30 minutes after that, maybe less, maybe 15 minutes, we get a very alarming and very serious tornado warning that a tornado is in the area. And it specifically says in the tornado warning, mobile homes will be destroyed. That's what it says in the tornado.

We're sitting here in our RV and we get a push notification that says mobile homes are about to be destroyed. As that clears, then we get a flash flood alert warning. This all is like within an hour. All of these alerts and the wind, it starts picking up. And at first we're like, geez, it doesn't look so bad out there. We look outside and it's clear blue skies. Oh, it doesn't seem so bad.

And then I noticed the awning starts to flap and then it starts to flap more. So I pull the awning in, our only, only source of shade. And then the winds really pick up. It starts rocking the rig and I bring up the radar of the storm and I can see we're just on the edge of the storm. So it's way too windy and chaotic to actually drive, but we're not like getting the brunt of this thing. There was nothing about this in the forecast, which I have been watching like a hawk, by the way, because it's literally life and death right now. So I watch it multiple times a day. There was nothing in the forecast about any of this.

It just starts dumping rain on us, but we figured we can handle the rain because we're from Seattle. So we go out and we start testing the rig in their parking lot, trying to get it to rock back and forth to see if our bungee patch will hold long enough for us to get 10 minutes down the road so we can hook up to power and at least run our air conditioning nonstop. And we tested in the driveway and it seems like it holds.

And so we set off towards the campground we had spotted earlier. And about five minutes into the drive, the rain picks up to monsoon level. I mean, it just starts slamming Tucson, raining so hard you could only see a few feet in front of the RV. And almost instantly, parts of the road began to flood, looking like almost a river rushing down the road. And thankfully, Jupes' heavy butt could manage it, and so we kept on going. But I couldn't believe how fast it was happening. And when we arrived at the campground, the rain slowed down, but it continued to pour. So, of course, I'm out there hooking up electricity because that's why I'm there. And it's still, even though it's all of this is going on, it's still 9,800 degrees outside.

So you still need everything hooked up. You still need air conditioning. You need the water. So I'm out there just getting completely drenched, horrible. Everything's dripping. And thankfully power's good. AC has been running. We've been here since Sunday. It has been livable. With the AC going 24-7, both of them, it maintains about 86, 87 degrees in here during the day, during the afternoon, 87 degrees, maybe 88. We can really only bring it 20 degrees below whatever it is outside. So as the temperature skyrockets outside, we kind of go with it. We just have a 20 degree buffer inside and it removes the humidity,

which is historically high in Tucson while we're here, which has resulted in historic growth of bugs, which has meant we are covered in bug bites because they've never had this many bugs here before while we're here. It's been absolutely wild. And because it's the Labor Day weekend, we had no progress on getting parts. We had to wait until this morning, Tuesday, to start making as many calls as we could. Shops around here have been shockingly misinformed about how these Sumo Springs, which are extremely popular and well-known, how they work.

It's been alarming, like some of these shops, what they do and don't know. And we're hoping to get some sort of temporary fix in place, maybe get them removed even so we can just make the drive home. Ideally, I'd love to have the shop that originally installed them fix it, but I don't know if we can make it up to Oregon. And the other issue is now that we've ended up getting stuck here for so long, we've ended up pushing into another heat wave. And so our drive home is over 100 degrees in many places, all the way until Southern Oregon. California is going to experience a massive heat wave next week. I-5 corridor will be over 100 degrees. When does that happen in California, right? And it's going to be miserable everywhere. So it has actually crossed my mind as a last resort. I've never

really thought about this before, but I am now considering abandoning ship and putting jupes in storage and driving home in our chase car and then fly back down here later. But of course, it's super expensive. Well, and that's just got to be hard emotionally too, right? I mean, you're abandoning your home basically. Yeah, I didn't go on this reunion road trip to abandon my home just after I got the slides fixed too, right? Like that wasn't the goal here. You don't go on a road trip to leave your vehicle behind. And yeah, it is our home. And it's like, so you'd want to make sure it's really well taken care of while we're not here. And it's miserable because I don't know how safe it is to drive on this or not. I assume because the tire has been rubbed, I should get it checked out professionally.

So I assume I shouldn't probably drive that far until I make sure my inner dually isn't going to explode on me. I imagine that our temporary fix with a bungee cord isn't going to last 1400 miles. In 100 degree weather? No, probably not. Right. And with roads that suck. And so we're using the crap out of our suspension system. It is become an impossible situation. And, you know, I feel like the shows will suffer because of it because I'm miserable. I'm barely making it through the days. And, you know, I feel like the shows will suffer because of it, because I'm miserable. I'm barely making it through the days. There's almost every day I've gotten heat stroke of mild heat stroke,

and I don't manage to recover until about an hour or two after the sun sets. And the days I record the RV gets so hot that it never really gets down until like 10 PM at night and back into a reasonable temperature and reasonable being low eighties inside. So it's, it's just, you know, it's like, I didn't want to come to Tucson for the meetup. I came to Tucson to get the RV fixed.

My slide broke in May, and I waited until September to just try to wait out the heat. With three kids during summer break, I waited with a broken living room slide. So I wasn't in Tucson in the dead middle of summer, like in August or something stupid like that. And I still am getting screwed by this weather. It's just, it's horrible. It's been really rough. And so I don't really know what I'm going to do. I don't know where I'll be next week. I don't know where I'm going to be later for recording self-hosted. It's just been awful. Stay tuned for the next Linux Unplugged, everyone. Hopefully there'll be one.

Yeah, hopefully there will be. And, you know, to make things extra difficult, the server is out at the studio. We haven't had a chance. Nothing could be done while I'm not there. And so, like, that is extra hoops have to be jumped through for production and just all these things, like, all these little things are adding up to make this end of the trip really difficult. And ironically, this is the wing of the trip I thought was going

to be smooth sailing because we'd have working slides. It was just going to be Hadiyah and I. We went from three kids and three adults to just two adults. And smooth sailing with no hard deadlines, like we didn't have any meetups to get to or anything like that. It was just take our time. And yet now here we are stuck in an area we never intended to be for more than a couple of days. And we're so desperate to get home now that we are going to have to push like hell once we can get out of here. It's a totally unfortunate situation. And it's just sort of one of the random things that can happen on a road trip this long, I suppose. the RV industry as well. So funny enough, the shop in Oregon has the parts we need, but the shops here in Tucson don't. And so like, it's just one of those things where if we were back at home right now, we wouldn't have a part shortage. That shop happens to have stock, but these ones down here, they don't. And where they would get their stock from is the shop we use back up in Oregon. Chris, may I ask how your tech infrastructure has lasted in this heat?

There was one day where I shut everything down just because we were, we just, we couldn't keep up with the heat. And so I turned it off just to make sure, you know, it was getting so, so hot, but otherwise it's been holding pretty well. Thankfully, the road trip to Texas last year, I kind of, you know, I learned a few tricks to keep that stuff running, But yeah, not fun. Not fun. It is great to have working slides again.

And if it was, you know, in the mid 80s and I was stuck here, it'd be no problem, right? That'd be no problem. Even low 90s would work because, again, we can get it down 20 degrees. So whatever the ambient temperature outside is, we can bring it down 20 degrees. Of course, some of that's offset by the fact that we're in direct sun. But at least now we're at a campground with power and water, so we can just turn them on and let them run, and we don't have to worry about using up gasoline and all that kind of stuff. Because that was another problem, of course, is we were stuck and didn't have gas.

So let's talk about good news. Let's talk about ingenuity. You know that little Linux copter on Mars? It has really, really done well. I mean, above and beyond. We've talked before about how well it's doing because it was only supposed to fly five times. And yet the little helicopter on Mars has completed 12 flights now. And given its stunning and unexpected success, the U.S. Space Agency has extended the admission indefinitely. The little helicopter that could has become a regular travel companion of the rover, Perseverance. So given all of its awesome success,

NASA says it's on board with keeping this thing flying indefinitely, if possible. Yeah, according to Josh Ravitch, the head of Ingenuity's mechanical engineering team, everything is working so well. We're doing better on the surface than we had ever expected. And we've actually been able to handle winds greater than we could really have ever hoped.

To add on to that, you know, Ingenuity, it's not just a tech demo anymore. At first, that was kind of the goal. Could it fly at all? You know, would this all survive the landing, the harsh temperatures? But now, they're actually doing real helpful science. temperatures. But now they're actually doing real helpful science. According to Ken Farley, head of Perseverance's science team, photos taken by Ingenuity during its 12th flight showed that a region that they might have wanted to check out with the rover, which of course takes a lot longer to get there. Well, the photo showed it's kind of just boring. And so they might

actually not send the rover there. Okay, maybe that's boring, but that means valuable time is saved, and they can go look for more interesting areas to do better science. That seems huge, actually. That seems like a great use of the Linux copter. Yeah, it really does. And hopefully it's going to keep going, right? I mean, in theory, it's been doing well, but there is an approaching Martian winter, kind of the reverse problem you're having, Chris.

So we'll see. Fingers crossed that Ingenuity makes it out. But regardless of what happens with our favorite first copter, NASA now has a whole bunch of data from all those flights and is already working on a next generation successor or two. Maybe something in the 20 to 30 kilogram range, able to carry science payloads. Ooh, very cool. 20 to 30 kilogram range, able to carry science payloads.

Ooh, very cool. I mean, just as a reconnaissance little robot too, it's so awesome. And, you know, I could see the winter being particularly challenging. The great thing is if it survives, you know the software is going to run. It's going to just keep going. You just say that because it's powered by Linux. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Well, let's talk about our friends over at Plasma. Plasma's Wayland session is getting really, really stable, at least just recently following a bunch of fixes. And of course, KDE developer Nate Graham continues to publish his weekly development summaries outlining all of the work, which we are very appreciative here on the show. We read every single week. This week, he's got good things to say about the state of KDE on Wayland. Gazillions of bug fixes, including many for the Plasma Wayland session. It's finally reaching stability. I'm using it myself as a daily driver now. And at this point, my biggest annoyances are all with third party apps, not any KDE software. all with third-party apps, not any KDE software.

I know it's taken a while, but I think we're very nearly there. That's great. And then you just add another three releases on top of that, and it's probably going to really be there. I kid, but some highlights of this Plasma 5.23, beyond just X-Wayland and Wayland support, of course, is there is now improvements to how the Plasma desktop experience is on Wayland. Like, for example, virtual desktops are now on a per-activity basis on Wayland again.

That wasn't the case before. That was only an X11 feature. And Plasma 5.23 will now correctly identify the sending app for notifications from Flatpak applications, both on Wayland and on X-Wayland. And there are fixes for multiple NVIDIA GPU issues with the Plasma Wayland session as well. And as Nate said, these are really just the cream of the

crop of a gazillion other fixes and improvements. KDE Plasma 5.23 is really looking like it will be a great release. I think it should arrive sometime in early October. I'm really looking forward to that. The daily driver I've switched to is Plasma early October. I'm really looking forward to that. The daily driver I've switched to is Plasma-based. They offer a bunch of different desktop options, but I went with the Plasma one, and I am so happy. There's a few tweaks that have been done to this one that have made me extra happy, and I'll share those with you when we get to that point. But first, there is a pretty anticipated development with NF tables. The Linux kernel is, as you know, very fast moving. But sometimes it seems like a few things can take a long time to land.

And I would say NF tables is one of those. Yeah, really, this is a good example of just sometimes it takes a long time to get stuff right or get it merged, get it to a place that's usable. And as usual, Jonathan Corbett at LWN has a really great write-up on some of the history and what's going on with NF tables, which, if you're not familiar, aims to replace the kernel's packet filtering subsystem. And it started way back in 2008, but it's still not being used by most, or perhaps even many, production firewalls. That transition may be getting closer, though, because there was just NF Tables 1.0 released on August 19th. Now look, we're not going to judge you firewall how you want a firewall. You packet filter how you like to packet filter, but some of us see a need for a change.

And, you know, that could include the fact that the kernel has more than one packet filtering mechanism, so it's complex. There's one for IPv4. Of course, as you probably just guessed, there's one for IPv6, and then there's one for ARP, and so on. And each one of those subsystems is mostly independent with a lot of duplicated work in code. Shock. Surprise, right? And beyond that, IP tables contain an excessive amount of built-in protocol knowledge. And I think some would argue it suffers from a lack of a proper API for people who want to manage it at scale. And so I think that has led people to look for an alternative, all of those things combined. It's not that IP tables is bad itself, it's just

everything in totality. You know, for people who like to mess with firewalls. It's just everything in totality. You know, for people who like to mess with firewalls. And really, more seriously here, the core idea behind NF tables is to kind of throw away as much of that protocol aware and specific machinery that you can and replace it with a simple virtual machine that can be programmed from user space. So administrators would still write rules referring to specific packet header fields and such, because, of course course that's kind of what you need to do when you're setting up firewalls. But then in this model, user space tooling would translate those rules into low level commands and load that into the kernel, which basically it means you get smaller packet filtering engine that is way more flexible and has the potential to perform a lot better. Mm, me like fast packet filtering. You know, I think a lot of us have probably heard the name NF tables because it did make a splash when it was launched, I'd say.

But then it just kind of, I don't know, it just kind of disappeared from view. In 2013, the project was essentially rebooted and got a lot of code or all of its code, I don't remember exactly, merged into the mainline kernel, and they did that as like job one. So they got done with that. NF tables found its way into the Linux 3.13 kernel back in 2014. That feels like a million years ago. And since then, kind of the hard work has been just filling in all the little gaps.

The core engine was in the kernel, but you actually need to make NF tables sufficiently appealing that users would want to make the transition. The language that you use to write those filtering rules, it's gained a lot of new features since then for stateful tracking, address mapping, and all kinds of other stuff like handling large rule sets. There's also documentation to write, of course. There is an NF tables wiki, which we'll have linked in the show notes,

but it sounds like that's still one area that is maybe a bit lacking. Yeah, I think though the biggest challenge, and I bet people listening right now are thinking this already, it's that there's so many people that are using IP tables already. You know, they have their setup that they like. They don't want to mess with it because they've developed it over years through blood, sweat, and tears and lots of hard lessons learned. And they just want it to keep working. It's been working for fine. Why switch to something like NF tables when IP tables is doing the job? And, you know, it's perfectly fast enough for them. I think that is going to be the biggest barrier to adoption and people switching over. Yeah. I mean, firewalls are a serious component of your security, right?

Like, you don't want to go changing this and suddenly realize that packets you thought were dropped are no longer dropped, or ports you thought were closed are suddenly open. But it may not be so bad, because in some cases, users might be able to make that jump without even noticing. Linux distributions have carried support for NF tables for a while now, and work is being done to port some tools like Red Hat's Firewall-D to NF tables. So if you're using a higher level tool, once they've switched the backend out, you can just keep your rules and that engine will handle converting things from IP tables to NF tables. Right. Or I suppose put another way, it's like if you're going to transition, maybe transition to this

higher level tool. So that way, when these kind of back end changes happen, you can move around. And I mean, it's deployed to a point, right? Like Debian got it in Debian 10 Buster, which was released in 2019. But Ubuntu didn't adopt it until 2104. So, I mean, most distros do have it, but 2104 is a fairly recent release of Ubuntu to actually have it land. Yeah, really. As with all these know, 2104 is a fairly recent release of Ubuntu to actually have it land. Yeah, really. As with all these things, it just takes a long time.

I mean, in this case, 13 years. But with 1.0, with NetFilter declaring IP tables now a legacy tool at the latest NetFilter workshop, it seems like now is a great time to give it a shot and prepare yourself for what may be our eventual future. Neil, I can hear your ears are burning. You've got something to say about this. Go ahead. Firewall D 1.0 happened, and that's actually going to land in Fedora Linux 35, and it defaults to NF tables. So it actually will transition everything over.

And if you're using most of the higher level default behaviors with Firewall D, like using services, telling it via ad ports or whatnot, it'll seamlessly translate those into NF tables rules. Libvert has already been adapted for it. Container engines are in the process of being adapted. I think they're all done in Fedora. So across the board, generally speaking, with Fedora Linux 35, you're going to see NF tables being used and you won't notice because it's all been done for you in the background.

If firewall D has been told by the user to add specific firewall IP tables rules, because you can do that, you can say, I want to add this IP tables rule and firewall D will manage it, then it won't auto flip, but otherwise it will. So in Fedora, it's already done. It's also the case in RHEL 8. They actually did it before Fedora did, because initially it happened in Fedora, it got reverted once, and now they're trying again and saying this is now good. And of course, in RHEL 9, it will be there too. I like that. That sounds good. A nice, smooth transition. That sounds appealing. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100

in credit on a new account and you support the show. You know, a Linux content creator out there, Nick at the Linux Experiment, just went full time a few weeks ago. And yesterday, YouTube shut down his channel with no communication. Or maybe by the time you're hearing this probably a couple of days ago. They just deleted his channel, removed it completely. And then told him that if he didn't respond fast enough, he'd be gone forever. And then just kind of gave him the cold shoulder. And he had just gone full time. That's so scary. Imagine that your livelihood, just like that taken away from you. And that's why I want to just say thank you to everyone who takes advantage of our sponsors, who understands the model that we

have here. This is an independent business. You know, it's just a small team of us that are independently working our butts off to make content every single week for you. And the reason why we can stick around and do these shows is because you take advantage of our sponsors or you become members or you tell people about the show. And the great thing about Linode is it's a perfect partnership where we can work with a partner that gets what we're doing and you guys get what they do. Because like JB, they're independently owned and they've been doing this one thing for a long time. They've been doing it longer than we have. They have been focused on cloud computing for 18 years.

I mean, that's really something that defines an industry. And they have focused on just doing a really good job at that. And because they're Linux geeks, along the way, they understood the reason why they should reinvest back into the community. They get how that works. They've helped projects out. They've helped out this network. I mean, they've really been there for a lot of different groups, including, although we don't get to go to them anymore, some of our favorite events like Linux Fest Northwest.

although we don't get to go to them anymore, some of our favorite events like LinuxFest Northwest. And as a longtime Linux user, I really can tell that they are fans, that they have built tools around Linux before the technology necessarily existed. Like at the time when they became their own ISP, it was extremely uncommon to run Linux on your routers and on your switches.

And I just, that was insane. Who does that? Who runs Linux on their firewalls, routers, and switches? Nobody does that. Well, Linode did. They wanted to figure out a way to do it. And as a result,

they have a flexible service that's been able to meet the needs of their users. And now they have 11 data centers around the world with nearly a million customers. And man, they've just built a product that you've got to check out.

And that's why they're confident in giving you $100. Because they know if they give you $100 and they give you 60 days to play with it, you're going to go on there and you're going to build something. You're going to try it and you're going to see that it's faster. The UI is cleaner. The documentation is better. The API is fantastic. And the customer support is the best in the business. That's why I run my business infrastructure on Linode. So go to linode.com slash unplugged, sign up, support the show and get $100 to kick the tires and see what we've been

talking about. Linode is the best way to host something. And they're true, real Linux users, so you can rest assured knowing that they love what they're doing. And I love it. I love it when that works its way into a product. Linode.com slash unplugged. You can't just use Linux for fun, can you? No, I only use it to get work done. You know that. Windows is for fun. Right. It's only a serious tool, and you should never download a distribution just because you think you might have fun with it.

Except for that's exactly what I did. A little while ago, on July 22nd, I decided to give Garuda Linux a try. And I kind of laughed it off as a project because, you know, it looked like Linux turned up to Neon 11 to me. And when it comes to ready-made Arch-based distributions, Endeavor OS and Manjaro really serve that purpose very, very well. And I just sort of instinctually kind of brushed it off thinking, yeah, that's what we need as another Arch clone.

Yeah, that's going to solve the problem. But then I decided, you know, I looked at their website and I liked a few things about it. I liked how opinionated it was. It felt like kind of a distro of before where they were going to kind of actually reminded me a little bit of Mandrake. I have to be honest with you. Where they've got some tools to manage the distribution. They've really picked a theme and identity. They embrace it. And they've optimized it for the user desktop.

And that's been their sole focus. And those are items that appealed to me. And I was ready just to, I was going to try an intermediary distro before our next review anyways. And so I decided to throw Garuda on my ThinkPad X1. And my initial impressions were that it was gaudy, that it was over the top, that it clashed a little bit in a few places. But as I started to use it, I started to take it a little bit more seriously. And I started to notice that my system felt a little more responsive. They use the Zen kernel, for example, which is, you know, you can argue for it or against it, but some people say it's great for desktop loads. They've chosen a CPU

scheduler also that's maybe more tuned for desktop performance. And they've done things like they've enabled ZRAM by default. They've turned on an out-of-memory killer. And they're using ButterFS as the default file system with ZTSD ZST compression. I don't know, Z standard compression, I guess it must be. Z standard. Anyways, it's a formula. It's a recipe that I like. And so I kind of tried to encourage Wes to take a look at it. And you've got fresher first impressions than I do, Wes. So I'm curious to know, like, when you decided to byte and you went over to the website and you gave it a download, just curious what your first impressions were. Ooh, there's just a lot here.

The theme kind of is intense, yes. Gotti's probably a good word for it, but it's consistent. There's elements that I like. It all hangs together very nicely. And there's just a lot of attention to detail in areas I'm not used to. I think we're used to thinking about the kind of attention to detail in the distro building and maybe a bigger classic distro sense and all the hard work that Fedora does that we highlight on the show to, you know, build the next generation of the Linux desktop and integrate a lot of these low-level tools or, you know, the Ubuntu team putting together an Ubuntu desktop release. But because it's built on Arch, you know, you're basically just installing a bunch of upstream software. And so you get these tweaks in other areas that you kind of don't on more mainstream distros. Yeah. You know, you can see this with Manjaro too. They provide you some

tools to select your kernel and they give you some wizards and they work you through part of the setup process. What Garuda does differently is they take all of that and they kind of turn it up to 12 or 13 even. And as I used it, they call their KDE look Dragonfied. And it's a variant of the suite theme for Plasma. And as I used it, it dawned on me, I've always had a problem with Plasma's sort of look and feel compared to Gnome Shell, like an elegance factor that Gnome Shell just felt like a little smoother in terms of look, a little sharper, a little cleaner. And on Plasma, I was always kind of attempting to get to that normal level of polish

but never quite getting there and always left a little frustrated. And I often just kind of just sort of gave up and always just went back to Breeze because Breeze works with everything and maybe it's not perfect. Just becomes kind of a workstation focus. Yeah, you're like, okay, whatever. It's not as beautiful as maybe I want, but it works great.

I love Plasma, so I'm happy enough. Where Garuda comes along and says, well, if it's not going to be beautiful, what if we just embrace the shit out of being different and kind of like an elite desktop? What if we just kind of lean into it a little bit? And that's what Garuda's done. Like the terminal is, it's got like a kind of a blurred fade to it by default.

They launch it with like NeoFetch output information. They've got a customized shell. The icons are very neon. The look is very, very unique. And it actually has won me over over time. And they have these management tools that I'd never heard of, like a free Epic launcher replacement. I got that installed now. They have boot options that let you tweak kernel parameters, select the default OS that boots, disable specter mitigations, and a lot more. I mean, they have tools for managing common ButterFS things, like getting an accurate free space reading, running a rebalance if you need, and it'll tell you, so you don't need to do this. It'll say right there, this is not needed right now, and give you tools

to manage the fact that you have ButterFS. And then on top of all of that, they have enabled time shift snapshots by default. And not only can you use the GUI and a command line interface to restore snapshots, but they also put a menu entry in Grub. So when you're booting up, you can just restore from a snapshot right there at the boot menu Grub. So when you're booting up, you can just restore from a snapshot right there at the boot menu. That's glorious when you're working with an Arch-based system. It really is like kind of a new,

maybe not new is the right word, but a different way of using Arch. Obviously the packages, right, are coming from Arch. It's a lot of that Arch goodness, but where I'm used to building up an Arch system for myself and kind of selecting stuff,

I feel like with Garuda, for good or bad, I almost have to do the opposite because so much of that has been done. Like you mentioned the terminal, that's probably where I crossed the line. I'm like, I don't want you showing NeoFetch every time I open the darn thing. That's just wasting my cycles. But it looks really nice. It's a good first

experience. And for some things, it might make more sense to start with this if you like most of what they do. To start with Garuda and then, you know, just tweak things back down a little bit if there's some stuff you don't need. So I'll give you an example. So I think they're trying to make Arch not for regular humans. They're not trying to make Arch for humans, like Ubuntu's making Debian for humans.

They're making Arch for geeks that want a powerful workstation. And you guys know that always pushes my buttons. And I'll give you an example. Like, you've ever had an Arch machine where you have key ring issues eventually? This happens to me on a machine if I don't update it frequently enough. Well, this has happened to some Garuda users.

So the team put together a tool that goes through and works out these key ring issues during updates. It automatically updates your key rings in the backgrounds, and it also lets you go through and install what they have as like a hotfix package which resolves the issue.

It's a tool that really is only applicable for a rolling distribution like Arch that has something like that that happens every now and then, and then this just smooths it out for you. And so they've built a few tools like that or included tools that have been created by other distributions. There's a little bit of that too. They're using the same installer that Endeavor uses and Timeshift, you know, or included tools that have been created by other distributions. There's a little bit of that too. Like they're, they're using the same installer that Endeavor uses.

And TimeShift of course is, you know, it's available for any distribution, but it's nice to see it. And it's, it has its own look, but you can change that. And if you change the theme, if it's too much for you, you've still got a lot of great choices. Snapshots by default, ButterFS by default, Current Plasma by default. I would also argue, although I think this is, people could see it the other way, I like that they're using the Zen

kernel and I like that they're using a desktop scheduler. I think those things are tweaks and changes that I've begun making to my boxes. And in part, that's how I came across Garuda is I, and Wes knows this, since I got my X1, I have been on kind of this pursuit to make it faster, to make it perform as well as it did under Windows. I mean, I think you kind of want to forget that there's, you know, anything between you and exactly what you want the computer to do, right? Like when you see those apps take a while to launch, that seems to cause you physical pain.

It does. Well, it really, it broke me after I, on a lark, tried Windows 11 on the X1, and it was faster, and the battery life was significantly better. Ugh. Like, no, this cannot stand. So I had been doing custom arch install, and I had done the, like, Alan Cox kernel, and I was doing all my little tweaks to, like, pre-cache stuff and put the browsers in RAM, all the stuff I've talked about before. And I was building a lot of this myself anyways. And that's kind of when I discovered Garuda. And I thought, well, this is silly, but I'm exasperated at this laptop at this point.

I'm just going to throw this silly distribution on there. And I admit I thought that way. And then about a week into it, I was like, oh, that's not so bad, actually. And I thought the first thing I'd do is change the theme, but I didn't. And that never happens. And so I stuck with it for a little bit. And now here I am. I'm like, man, I've been using this for more than a month.

And I think this is my new go-to Arch. And I'm not recommending it for everybody. I still think Manjaro and Mainline Arch, if you want to use Arch, are the way to go. That's my official recommendation. But if you kind of line up with me and how you want your Linux desktop to perform and how you use Linux, it's worth a fun look because if nothing else, it's like visiting a version of Linux that used to be very common, where they had lots of apps and tweaks preloaded. They had management tools. They had a strong

identity and they tried to solve a specific problem for a specific niche. And that's what Garuda does, including it has various different versions. Because, like, Wes, I know you're a huge gaming guy now. So I installed the gaming version. Yeah, right? Why not? It comes with Steam. It comes with a whole bunch of handy tools.

And honestly, that's one area where it is kind of nice because, yeah, all right, I like to play games, but not that many and mostly on Linux. nice because, yeah, all right, I like to play games, but not that many and mostly on Linux. I don't keep up with the latest and greatest of optimizing NVIDIA integrations with stuff or like little tweaks to make gaming go better. So if Garuda does, that's pretty useful because it's exactly the kind of thing where I don't necessarily want to spend an hour. I might want to go play with NF tables rather than tweak my system for gaming so I can get something out of the box that just makes it easy. That's great. Yeah. They also, in their management tools,

they have options to like check a box to turn on auto CPU frick, or maybe you want thermal D. So they have a few things to just make it quick to play with that kind of stuff, which this was my take on it. It's just, they have a lot of tools that you can do something really quick. That's just an alternative to you going and looking up how to do it in the wiki and then doing the same thing on the command

line. Like, it's nothing you couldn't figure out on your own if you're this type of user. But maybe you don't want to have to all the time. And it's neat to see them working on that. And it's interesting too in the Arch world. I feel that, you know, some other distributions sometimes, I don't necessarily know where to look. You know, I might be curious

what that GUI tool is, but because they kind of do it their own way, I don't always know like exactly how that's implemented under the hood. But because, I mean, it's just on Arch, you can kind of tweak it in Garuda. And then if you want to, yeah, go pull up the wiki and go find out where all that lives under the hood. Yeah. And as far as I'm concerned, it's staying on this laptop. And the next time I need a quick Arch box, I'm going Garuda because they're doing 98% of the tweaks that I would do. And also, I think it's one of the funnest distributions out there. It is a blast to try this thing. They have a clever community. They have what, about eight members on their team, we think, Wes, roughly? Yeah, sure seems like it. And seemingly from across the world.

And it's fairly new. I think it kind of came out last year, so it's been around for over a year now. And they've set up some services for their community. I didn't bother looking into how to sign up, but I did notice that they had a hosted Bitwarden available, hosted NextCloud, a private Pastebin alternative, a collaborative notepad thing. They had a few services that they would make available to their community, and they also make a start page available, which, you know, I don't, I don't need that, but it's nice. It's a good idea. And it's further extending open source, other open source projects too. Right. And I think it adds to that, that feeling of community,

right? Like you feel like you're, it's not just like for better or worse in the arch world, you're kind of left out on your own, right? Like they've got the wiki and there's forums, but like you are the one who's doing this. And grew to feel it's just a little bit more like people are out there to maybe hold your hand if you want to hold hands. You know, Chris, I was noticing those services when I went diving in to try to find out how active this project was. And I expected them to be charging a little bit of money for these services, but it seems to me I couldn't figure out a way to give them money for the services. They're just kind of giving it to the community. There's certainly a donate page, but it'd be nice to see a project like this

stick around for a while. So they have a couple of ways to contribute right now. The primary way they want you to contribute, the problem there is that platform is really only set up for monthly contributions, where I basically, I wanted to send them 50 bucks and say, thanks for the great distro. I don't necessarily want to send them 50 bucks and say, thanks for the great distro. I don't necessarily want to send them money every single month. I like to annually give to projects that I'm still using because my usage changes sometimes.

And then the second way they recommended things, oh, also the first way they recommend things, you can go in there and set up an account connected to your PayPal. But then when you go to contribute monthly, because I kind of just decided, fine, I'll do monthly, then it doesn't let you use PayPal. So then you have to connect to a bank. So I bailed at that point. I switched over to just send them a PayPal payment, which they have a link for that.

I was going to send them $50, and then I got an error saying that their PayPal stuff isn't working and you can't send them money right now. They're using Open Collective to track expenses and try to document everything, so they're doing it in an open governance way, so I like that. When they get their payment stuff sorted out, I'll send them a few bucks because it's been a great little desktop for me. And I think they should keep it going. I think they're doing something fun and unique here.

And even if it's just a testing ground for fun ideas, I love this. And that's where I kind of wonder if there is a place for the fun distro. Like, hear me out for a second, but I think you could make the argument that experienced Linux users who know how to submit bug reports, who maybe can kind of suss out the nature of a problem, they can probably help reproduce that problem. I almost feel like we have an obligation to use more mainstream distributions like your Ubuntu's

and your Fedora's and even your Mint's, because those distributions need people submitting bugs. And they need users who understand how to submit bugs. And that's us, right? But here we are using these sort of niche distributions that maybe don't have a bigger impact on the wider Linux ecosystem. And that's where I wonder if it's slightly irresponsible on somebody who considers himself a Linux advocate's part to use a distro like that. What are your thoughts, gentlemen? Hmm, that's kind of tough.

You're right. I mean, it is out there and you're not using, you know, some stuff that's been customized by the distro as much. Maybe you're just relying on the more upstream Arch packages. So I don't know, I have two minds. I think there is an element of truth to that, Maybe you're just relying on the more upstream Arch packages. So, I don't know, I have two minds. I think there is an element of truth to that, but I also think that maybe the kind of issues that you're going to run into as someone who gravitated towards this kind of optimized distro for certain use cases

are probably different than maybe the Wi-Fi issues that someone might have as a new user trying to use an Ubuntu desktop. So I think it's still important that you, you know, you contribute both to Garuda and also maybe start filing some bugs upstream for stuff that doesn't work. But I don't know that I would worry too much about it. Seems to me like a project like this might get someone more interested or like get their mind thinking about things they never thought of before. Like some of the features you mentioned that they just make very easy to just kind of click

and turn on. Wes was mentioning that having it work by default, but then diving in with curiosity to see how it all works. That speaks to me and gets my ears up. That is exactly how I love to learn. So I could see a project like this just getting us a whole bunch more contributors than we originally had. Yeah, okay.

Bytebitten, you had something you wanted to add on the subject. Yeah, so I jumped in with the Dragonized gaming version. I was like, well, hit me with it. And I was astonished by all the tools they deliver with it or even giving you the choice. Because I didn't know half the choices that I got where I felt informed do I want an emulator they got an entire page of that and I can now check that information and only downside is that I can't get my NVIDIA proprietary driver working but that's where the Butterfest snapshot feature came in and And I was like, back.

And you can keep testing and testing. And well, the only thing is that the Dragonize version is a bit too sparkly for me. So I will probably step back to a normal version and then use their tooling to get back on it. But also, you can install like five different software boutiques and updaters and stuff like that. So whatever you want, they have the choice for you to just check the box, click install, and it's done. Yes, they have now a third configuration screen. That might be a bit troublesome if you want to check for a setting somewhere in one of those three. But yeah, it's really nice. And also a lot of things I found in Barchi,

where I was like, Barchi is my home system. Garuda felt like a bit like a new home to me. Yeah, it feels like a new home to me as well. And I think my take on the using the niche distros versus putting your attention and focus on the mainstream distros is it means the onus is on me to recognize or at least attempt to recognize as best I can that if I'm encountering a bug, is it because I'm using a different scheduler? Is it because I'm using a Zen kernel? Or is it because I'm using a very opinionated theme and this app isn't rendering

correctly? The onus is on me to figure that out. But potentially, because it is an Arch derivative, I'm using a lot of upstream packages, and I could still have an impact on those upstream projects if the bug is legitimate. And I think if I'm willing to accept that compromise that, hey, the onus is on me to suss out the cause of this, and that is something I'm willing to accept, then I don't think it is a bad thing. I think you can still have an impact, and because the beautiful thing about open source is if I report an issue with console on Garuda, it's going to improve the situation

for somebody on a future version of Fedora using Plasma as well. And so I say, you know what? To hell with it. Go use the fun distro for a little while. Have some fun. That's why we got into this stuff. Stop taking it so seriously all the time, and just have some damn fun. That's why we got into this stuff. Stop taking it so seriously all the time and just have some damn fun. That's what I say. Also, I want to mention

that our friends over at a cloud guru have a course on Linux web services. So it's a course that focuses on the tools and utilities used to configure web services on a Linux host. So you're going to install Apache. You're going to install squid. I believe NGINX. You're going to set up virtual hosts. You're going to set up reverse proxying, which is dope. You're going to install Apache. You're going to install Squid, I believe, Nginx. You're going to set up virtual host. You're going to set up reverse proxying, which is dope. You're going to mess with HTTP and SSL, load balancing. It's all in there, including how to collect Apache metrics and all that stuff on Nginx as well. So head over to our show notes or go to cloudguru.com and search for Linux web services.

We will have a link in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 422. Thank you to CloudGuru. Now, we have some email to get into. Gentlemen, what do you say? Time for some feedback? Well, yes, our mailbag today is quite on theme because Oren has finally switched to Plasma. Ah.

He writes, IJB, I finally did it. After the recent episode in which you guys talked about KDE Plasma as a great alternative to Gnome, I finally switched. I'm an Ubuntu user who prefers his desktop environment clean and stable. I don't like to install plugins and prefer to just use what comes out of the box,

which is why my Gnome desktop stayed the same pretty much all the time. I held off on KDE largely because every time you guys talked about it, it sounded like you'd have to configure and invest time to get the whole system into a usable state. But I have to say, after a quick install, I love every minute of KDE. I feel like a younger version of myself

when I first started using Windows 95 after spending way too long in DOS. I click on every setting KDE has to offer. I've been going over it for over a week and I still find cool new things. There's nothing that compares to it. The system is fully customizable, but it also works great with the default settings

right out of the box. From my side, I'm sold and I'm never going back. Yeah, the trick is, Oren, is to still get your work done and not spend all your time playing with all the settings. That's why you didn't have the dock done this morning. Yeah, I was too busy playing with my plasma. Yeah, I do love it. I do love it a lot. Thanks, Oren, for writing in. And I'm glad you like it. You know, I think it's different folks, different strokes. We got a bunch of suggestions for like DWM last week after I complained about wanting tiling on particular virtual desktops. But, you know, different desktops for different

folks. But plasma is working really great for us. I think all three of us now are on Plasma, right? Yeah, it's your fault, Chris. Thank you very much. All right. Well, you know, I'll take that blame. I'll take that blame. We do have a bit of housekeeping.

And I just wanted to mention the LUP plug because I haven't been able to make it for a few weeks because I've been dying in the heat. But the LUP plug continues on a nice, chilled, relaxed chat with Linux friends. You can get information about our mumble room at Linux unplugged.com slash mumble. Go over there. Enjoy. And we'd also

love to hear from you. Fact, we'd love to do a feedback episode again. It's been a bit. So send your questions in. We're going to start collecting them. I just decided right now. Linux unplugged.com slash contact. Send in your questions to the show about anything we've covered in the past that you'd like us to follow up on, anything about the show itself, or a technology stack that you've got questions about.

We'll take them at LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. And last but not least, join the conversation that continues every single week at JupyterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram. You can go in there, hang out. There's members of our crew chatting in there all the time. Oh, I suppose I do have one more thing. So not quite last, but now this one is. But definitely not least, the stickers. Go over to jupitergarage.com and grab yourself a sticker.

They're great. They're fresh. And they're high resolution. And they make your laptop just look better. That's at jupitergarage.com. We have a pick this week, and this one is useful because YouTube has a habit of just pulling down content these days. So how about something to replace that YouTube DL, which seems to be on the rocks these days? Yeah, YTDLP, a YouTube DL fork with additional features

and fixes. How about that? I mean, I love me some YouTube DL. I probably use it, if not every day, at least several times a week. But that's the beauty of open source, right? You can take something, maybe it's not seeing as much investment or maintenance, or you just have some new ideas. You can fork it, you can remix it, you can make it better. Yeah, it has all kinds of interesting features that they've added on top of YouTube DL. In fact, some things are really simple, just like the way it displays different formats. But then other things are fascinating. You can mark and remove sponsor sections in YouTube videos by utilizing the sponsor block API, and it has built-in support for that.

It supports all kinds of resuming scenarios that YouTube DL doesn't, including workarounds for when YouTube throttles you. If anybody's a heavy YouTube DL user, you've run into this, where YouTube starts throttling you. It happens to me. They got workarounds for that as well. But we have a bonus YouTube pick as well, because I think the faster you can get content off YouTube, the better. And this one is YTM DL, or YouTube Music Download. YTMDL, it's an app that just gets songs from YouTube in MP3. It grabs all of the metadata you'd like to and takes care of that, like the artist name, the album name, all of that. Yeah, that's the added benefit here. I mean, sure, YouTube DL, you can tell it to download MP3, but YTMDL, well, it's going to go out to

sources like iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, Last.fm and pull all that juicy metadata that if you want to add this to your personal collection, you really need to have. That's pretty nice to see. And you guys know we're big fans of PeerTube here on this show. We think that's a great way for content creators that want an independent under their control media platform for video. But there's a lot of other alternatives out there, too. So the great thing about these apps is they

support just about every semi-popular video streaming site. So it's not just YouTube that they work with, but we mention it because that's the most popular and that's how they name them. You know, pick suggestions. Another great use of that contact form. You get the sense I really would like people to email us in questions and ideas and stuff just to help us out while we're on this road trip. Because my God, has it been miserable on this road trip. We could use the help, you know. And it's a great way to touch base with the audience. If you've got something that you've added to your workflow that you think other folks

in the audience might benefit from, yeah, please do send it in. Bonus points if it's made with Rust. Totes. Wow. Yeah. I mean, we love to play the horn. And then also, I'm still on the road for a bit. I don't know exactly what my sitchmication is, and I don't know how many meetups I'll

be able to do, but check out colonytracker.live, and there's a micro meetup link there. And if you can't meet up with me, but maybe you know something about the area I'm in, because we have the live map there. The tracker is still going. It looks like it's broken because it's been stuck in the same spot for a while. But this could be a way to help out. If you know a spot where I could store the RV, potentially, if I have to bail. If you know something about the area I'm in, or if you'd like to meet up and grab a bite, potentially. There's a micro meetup link at colonytracker.live.

And I mention that because it sends a push notification to me. And so I see those. We have a channel that we collect those in. So sometimes like the emails and stuff, they'll slip through the cracks every now and then. Whereas that is a specific channel for that purpose. So something over at colonytracker.live if you'd like to help out. In the meantime, if you do the Twitter thing, you can follow the show over at at Linux Unplugged. The entire network is at Jupyter Signal, where we have all kinds of announcements for podcast releases

and, I don't know, other show news and stuff like that. And if you work in the tech industry, go check out Linux Action News. Every Monday morning, Wes and I break down everything that matters in the world of Linux, nothing more, nothing less. And sometimes that means it's a 15-minute show when there's nothing going on in the dead of summer, and sometimes it means it's a 40-minute show. But what we do is we cut out all the BS and we focus on just the stuff we really think you need to know about, and we try to do the best analysis possible for you.

That's LinuxActionNews.com. And the show continues to roll on regardless of where I'm at live on a Tuesday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah. 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Wherever I'm at, I just go by JB time. It makes it easier.

Links to everything we talked about today, including the contact page, Mumble server, our Matrix community, how to subscribe. It's all at LinuxUnplugged.com. Links for this specific episode, LinuxUnplugged.com links for this specific episode linuxunplugged.com slash 422 and that's it that's pretty much it you can get links

to everything right there thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program assuming I survive the heat

maybe maybe I'll even be lucky to get the hell out of here man should never have built in Tucson assuming all that works out, see you right back here next Tuesday! All right, JBtitles.com.

Everybody go over there and vote. Let's pick our title, see if we can name this thing. So I finally did it. I wasn't even going to mention that I was using Garuda. I don't know why. I just thought like, I'll keep this to myself. You know, Chris, you kept it so to yourself that even despite my living with you for, what, two weeks, I had no idea.

Yeah. So well done, sir. Well done. So did you guys see that Boiling Steam had an interview with the Code Weavers folks? And in that interview, they tried to clarify that, hey, we don't think Valve meant that the Steam Deck is going to be able to run every Steam game from a software perspective. We think Valve just meant the hardware would be capable of it

if the developers put the effort to get it working on Proton. And I think that has been a massive misread. People, because of that IGN interview that Valve did, it sounded like Valve was saying every game in the Steam library they're hoping to have run on the deck by the end of the year. And what CodeWeavers is saying, the people

that would be plumbing that, they're saying, actually, it's just possible, but it doesn't mean that every game will work. I think that's a huge difference in what the narrative is out there right now. And it's going to have a lot of people who pre-ordered potentially disappointed if they don't get the memo.