LINUX Unplugged - 423: What Makes a Linux User?

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Why it might be time to re-think who is and who is not a Linux user, plus we do a reality check on the state of Linux phones. Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

Did we just hear that someone in the Mumble room is running Solaris? Tell me about this. Yeah, so I've got a Solaris virtual machine running in QEMU, and I've got IRC running over Telnet inside of Solaris inside of a virtual machine. Why? I honestly don't know. I was bored. I mean, isn't that the reason for anything? Yeah. Because I can.

And, I mean, at this point, he might be the last Solaris user out there. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome in. And this episode is brought to you by CloudGuru. You know, they are the leader in learning for Cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses. My name is Brent. check there. And maybe we'll then try to work out the line exactly where do you draw what makes a

Linux user and what doesn't make a Linux user. And as funny as it sounds, that question, as we kicked it around as a team before the show, turned out to be a lot harder to answer than you might think. We'll go into details on that. But first, before we get into the show, right at the top, I want to say hello, time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Good evening. Hello. Hi.

It's nice to, I can't see you today because of this remote setup I have going, but I can hear you and I can feel you. So it's good to have you there. This is the last remote show for a while. I made it to Oregon and Joops is all fixed up as of like an hour before the show. I feel like at this point you shouldn't even tell us. You're just going to jinx it. I know. And actually, it's not even totally fixed.

There is still one more. That's how it always goes. You say last remote show, but how can you be sure? Well, if it breaks down again, he's just going to move to Oregon. Pretty much. Like, I just can't have it. We made it into the shop yesterday and they squeezed us in on a Monday, but they couldn't finish. They figured out what went wrong.

They fixed it for us, and we also improved it a little bit by adding a few more what are called coney shocks. They're very, you know, oh, coney. You like coney. Oh, okay. And we got those installed, and the ride's better than ever. She really is riding so, so great. I wish I could have done this work ironically before the trip, but you know, we wouldn't have been in here if we didn't have the suspension problems, but

they finished her up about an hour ago. And then I rushed to a spot that is without any kind of doubt, Brent, the best spot I have been in since we started the road trip. And I wish I could have brought you here because I feel like you got a bad picture of what all the RV parks are like. Because you didn't really get to go any nice ones. What? You told me the whole time these were great. No, no, no. This one we're at is great. So what's different about it that makes it so chic?

Well, you're going to like this. First of all, cement pads everywhere. Everything's cement. Creamy. You got grass. Oh, yeah. Trees with shade and super fast Wi-Fi. Beautiful landscapes.

Bridges over creeks and just a wonderful facility. Nice bathrooms. Huge showers. Really like a destination RV park. And they let us in early too like usually you can't even get into like two o'clock but the show goes live at noon and i needed to be in before that to set up they let us in a couple of hours or well more than a couple hours early no extra charge just because they you know they wanted to make sure we could get set up for the show

how great is that that's pretty amazing how's the dog park though, though? I'll tell you, he's out enjoying it right now. I got on the air and Hadiyah took Levi out for some fun. I was like, we just, boom, got right to it because there's a lot to do today. So why don't we get into some community news? And the first one is a series of stories that kind of came together to give us an update on the state of Linux on phones. And you might have heard that Purism is raising the price of the yet-to-be-fully-fulfilled Librem 5, now, I think, making it more expensive than an iPhone 13, ironically. That is impressive by itself.

Yeah, Purism wrote that we will be increasing prices for all new orders of the Librem 5 in stages. So the phone will be priced at $11.99 for all orders received on or after November 1st, 2021. And then the price goes up another $100 to $12.99 if you order after March 2022. Although they do go on to note that they have a refund policy. Good, you know, and it's, I also appreciate the early communication on it, but it really feels like a desperate move. The hardware of this thing

is already so substantially uncompetitive. And even if they make some investments, like they say they might, into the hardware, it's so far behind everything else that you can't make the hardware the value proposition. And the software, well, I think the whole package gives us all a bit of a reality check. And it seems like every time we see one of these disappointing updates from Purism, we learn again just how hard it really truly is to take on the Apple and Google duopoly because it's not just the hardware. It's the software and the ecosystems.

And that just alone has its own incredible challenges, many of which I don't think we can even appreciate since we can't fully inspect the code of iOS and Android. We can't even see all the problems they've solved. Android, obviously, at least the base is more open, but that whole Google layer is closed off to us, as is on iOS. It's with this that you think, okay, well, where can we focus and do good? If we can't really compete on the software, at least at the user level and the APIs and the ecosystem, can we compete in a way that is more genuine to free software, more like how we do it, where we slowly build up over time and we upstream technology and in the last week i think there was a link that started getting spread around that really

made me think like this challenge is so much greater than we've ever conceptualized there was a post that was authored in mid-june but it's been i don't know why but it's been getting linked around like crazy this week and the post was created by Medaille or Medaille. I apologize because he's a security researcher. You may be familiar with the projects that he's worked on. They work on who X or who Nix, I should say. And their post was getting shared around. And it really was trying to draw attention to mobile Linux OS is lacking what we would consider really kind of table stakes, standard security features in Android or iOS.

Yeah, they note that at this point, Linux phones lack any significant security model. And the points from the Linux article apply to Linux phones fully. I mean, if you read their article about the Linux security implications, you get Linux on a phone, all of those basically port over. There's not yet a single Linux phone with a sane security model. They don't have modern security features such as full system Mac policies, verified boot, strong app sandboxing, something we're still working on on the desktop, modern exploit mitigations, and so on, which even most modern Android phones already deploy. Those are all fair points, right? There is mandatory access controls

and limiting application data access with sandboxing and, you know, a lot of stuff we have all the fundamental plumbing for, but we're just not necessarily employing in our mobile OSs yet. There's that kind of security. And then there's the kind of security that we talk a lot about on Self Hosted and we talk about on this show. And that's the security from eavesdropping and the privacy that you get from controlling your own devices or having access to application data or being able to install arbitrary applications,

right? There are different kinds of security and they're all important. And the Linux devices are really good at like the privacy and user control kind of security. Do you follow what I'm saying? I think in all of this, like the observations here are definitely true, but we're still stuck in that middle ground. And maybe we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the show. But like what are we marketing here? Are these phones made for the average user who doesn't know what they're doing? Is that the end goal?

Because if so, then yeah, right? Like they are not competing on the terms of protections that we now have for those users. But at the same time, I kind of hate that on a non-rooted Android phone, I don't really feel like it's my phone. I can only do a subset of the things I'm used to doing, which means I still haven't shifted a majority of my workflows off the desktop, you know? And so there is kind of that balance. Like I want security, but I want it in the way that I can opt into it and I'm aware of it. And I don't know that we really have anything that meets all of those needs. Yeah. To say nothing of the apps like mapping and... Well, yeah, you still have to have apps that actually let you get your stuff done. And then there's

sort of the lower level stuff, right? The Post does a great job of noting that we have a lot of the plumbing for decent firmware updates. But when you look at the devices that are out there right now, there's not really a lot of standardized ways of doing it. Let's look at the Librem and PureOS again. But in practice, over the years, it means that users can't update to new firmwares released by that vendor because you have to wait for the Purism version, which sometimes maybe gets old, out of date, insecure, has known vulnerabilities. Like, it's not sustainable for every vendor to be releasing their own custom free versions of firmwares. And then you're back in that choice problem, right? Where you're like, well, okay, I get that. And maybe some users would prefer to wait for that.

But then there might be other users who are like, okay, well, this isn't ideal, but I would rather just take the security update even if it's proprietary firmware right now. And they can't do that. But there's a layer to security in these mobile devices that we've touched on before, but is trickier than I think we can appreciate. And that is sometimes there's components in there

that don't necessarily even trust each other. And how you implement that isolation matters. Yeah, it's really worth reading the full post here. And of course, that'll be linked in the show notes. But as an example, we talk a lot about the importance of like modem isolation, right? You've got this baseband stuff that really no one trusts. And we're always hearing about how those cellular modems are basically essential on a device. But they're also kind of risky and can receive all kinds of commands

to do remote snooping on you. And then there's the, you know, what the Librem 5 is trying to do to try to isolate that modem. It seems it's a little unorthodox because it actually attempts to isolate the modem using the Linux kernel's USB stack. Interesting in theory,

but that stack wasn't necessarily designed as a strong isolation barrier, which the article really highlights. Yeah, you can see how that could be target number one for an attacker is just figure out how to how to hop around just right there. Brent, I think the unspoken thing, too, when we talk about Linux phones, and I'm curious if this is true for you, because this is how I feel when I'm thinking about a Linux phone long term, I'm curious if this is true for you, because this is how I feel. When I'm thinking about a Linux phone long term, I'm still trying to solve the problem I was probably trying to solve back in 2002. And that is have a mobile compute device that lets me do the kind of work I need to do when I need to do it in a pinch. And that's, I think, something Linux could offer me on a device that iOS and Android can't. And I think that's really what still appeals to me about these devices and the privacy.

Yeah, I think those of us in this wonderful Linux niche of ours just want that sort of mobility. I know you've been talking about it for years. And it feels like we're still really far away from that, even though we've been thinking about it for a long time. Some people are working really hard on it. Far away from that, even though we've been thinking about it for a long time. Some people are working really hard on it, but man, it feels like smart posts like this just make me feel kind of sad and sick all at once about the current state of affairs, really. Sad and sick at the same time is a great way to put it.

Although I do have a glimmer of hope because I feel like my use case is going to be addressed one day. Like I think I'll probably one day I'll be like a two phone guy again. And I'll have instead of an Android and iPhone again, I'll have probably an iPhone and probably a Linux phone. And I'll use the iPhone for some of my traveling apps and stuff like that. And maybe I'd use the Linux phone for like remote work or doing, you know, any kind of thing that requires anything outside the box. I guess we're going to need bigger pockets though. I mean, I suppose devices just get smaller and smaller, so maybe we can make it work. Two words, my man, two words, tactical pants. They're a real thing. Do you not know about tactical pants? I'm just not sure they're my style. Tactical shorts, maybe? Yeah, maybe you should go with the tactical shorts, Wes. You

should probably go with the tactical shorts. They have vests, you know? You can keep your Linux phone in your vest. Oh, I'm all about a vest. Mm-hmm, you know it. Looks like the dev kits are on the move. So let's do a little quick update. Valve has sent out a short little blurb to developers saying

that if you haven't gotten your deck yet, you should get it soon. And they've included in there some sweet shots. Seriously, we'll have a link to the article where the deck looks good, hooked up to maybe even possibly a mechanical keyboard getting all of its OS updates.

Yeah, Liam over at Gaming on Linux notes that a few developers have already received their units, saying that Gary Newman of Facepunch commented that Rust runs good on the Steam Deck, and they're working with EasyAntiCheat to get it all hooked up, which is very important. Also saw Phil Spencer of Xbox had access as well, and commented on Halo, Age of Empires, and xCloud all working nicely. It also seems that the Terraria developer ReLogic also has a dev kit. They noted on Twitter to say that

Terraria and the Steam Deck, perfect combination for your adventures. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in credit for 60 days on a new account. And of course, you go there to support the show. So that's Linode.com slash unplugged. Linode is our hosting provider. They have been for a couple of years now. I became a customer first. I signed up because I was, I'll be honest, I was a little Linode curious.

You might be a little Linode curious too. I recommend you take this opportunity to support the show and get that $100. And after I tried it out, I thought, this is where we're going to build everything. And then once we got the idea to go independent again, I knew I was going to need a lot of infrastructure fast. And I knew I was going to have to make a serious decision about where I host that infrastructure. You know, because like, A, I want it to run great, because that's part of what I think the JB experience is, is that you get our files super fast and everything runs really well. And the sites are always up when you expect them. And B, I wanted something that was going to be reasonably priced.

And C, I wanted something that I felt like was a company I could trust long term. Everybody makes their own judgment call on this, but I have worked with companies that are VC backed and I have worked with companies that are independently funded. I've worked with companies that are VC backed and I have worked with companies that are independently funded. And I don't think it's a surprise to any of you guys to know that I'm always going to go with the independently owned, independently funded. And for me personally and for my business, I'm not ever going to host with any company that's VC funded. And that's just my personal choice. Everybody has to decide those things. But after having close exposure to the VC world and understanding how that goes and how it works, I made my decision. And Linode beyond just that has fantastic performance. So not only are they independently owned, but they have been since 2003. They've got 11 data centers around the world. They became their own ISP years ago. That's the level we're talking about here, right? They became their own ISP. They have great fast links to all their data centers. And their pricing is 30% to 50% cheaper than the major cloud providers.

Something else to consider, too, is if you're all in on one cloud provider, you might want to look at Linode as a multi-cloud part of your strategy. I think that's pretty important to look at over the next couple of years. And Linode could work out great there too. So get started by going to linode.com slash unplugged. They have great customer service, the best in the business, and you're going to be really impressed with how fast things are, how clean the dashboard is.

I think you're going to like it. Just going to take a guess. So head over to linode.com slash unplugged, get $100 for your new account and try this stuff out. Go build something, go learn something, go experience something. There's a lot of places out there to host stuff. There's a reason. There's several of them. Why we choose Linode. It's linode.com slash unplugged. It's the last time we got to clean up on the road. Oh man. It's been a mess. I am really looking forward to being back in the studio. Nothing like a, like a 40 day road trip that makes you super appreciate having a mess. I am really looking forward to being back in the studio. Nothing like a 40-day road trip that makes you super appreciate having a studio.

Really looking forward to that. I want to also mention our friends over at the Ubuntu podcast are wrapping up the show. The final episode will be season 14, episode 30, and it will be released on Thursday, September 30th, 2021. And they're going to have an online after party with listeners on Friday, October 1st. With more details to come on that, we'll try to pass that along as we can. But I just wanted to say congratulations to them for 14 years of making a great show. No kidding. What an accomplishment. I mean, that kind of regularity, the quality of

content they've churned out continuously throughout the years, just sticking to it, it's something else. And it really is the end of an era. It is. And you look back, 14 years is a long time. There is so much in that back catalog of things that happened. I may do a little back catalog spelunking to celebrate. So be sure to tune in for episode 30 from season 14, which will be released on Thursday, September 30th. And we will try to get our friends Wimpy and Popey on when their schedule allows, so that way you can still hear from them and get their opinion on Linux stuff.

They can join us in the virtual lug, of course. And speaking of the virtual lug, the LUP plug happens every Sunday. Every Sunday, this Sunday, and every Sunday at noon Pacific in our mumble room. You can get the details at Linux unplugged dot com slash mumble to set up your mumble client, I guess. And you can get the time converted at Jupiter Broadcasting dot com slash calendar. And that's all happening every Sunday. And I you know what? I'm going to recommend it.

I know shocker, but I'm going to recommend it. I know, shocker, but I'm going to recommend it. What doth make a Linux user? What means you are a Linux user? What makes you that? Is it that you have a device in your home that runs Linux, like a router or an Android device? This is a conversation that came up recently on Coder Radio, and my co-host Mike defines a Linux user

as anyone who uses Linux in some capacity, either through voluntary methods or involuntary methods. And I think I draw the line at anyone who chooses to use Linux. So you choose to get a Raspberry Pi, even though you might have Mac and Windows or whatever on your desktop, you choose to get a Raspberry Pi, or perhaps you buy a Chromebook because it runs Linux. And anytime you make an active choice to use Linux, I consider you a Linux user.

And we've been kicking this around and how does that influence how we create content in the show and how we view our potential audience? the show and how we view our potential audience. And the question has come up with where do we draw the line as far as the desktop? And is that, and this is the conversation I'd like to have with you guys, is that a requirement to be considered a Linux user? We got a tweet from listener Poke who said, Chris Lass, I admire your quest to get Linux running on your ThinkPad with the same battery life and performance you got on Windows. Because I, side note, I tried out Windows 11 on my ThinkPad X1 like ages ago when Windows 11 first came out, the ISO that you could get. And it ran great. The battery life was better.

The performance was better than I ever saw with Linux. This is the first time I ever had Windows on this laptop, and I was shocked that it was that much better of an experience. I hadn't seen that kind of differential in a long time. Well, Poke goes on to say, I've got to admit, I've given up, and I just run Windows on mine. And the ugly truth is, Windows 11, for my needs, is really nice. I know it's super unpopular, but I think the Linux community would really benefit from being accepting of the idea that you can be an inherent Linux fan and still choose to run Windows on the desktop. Sometimes that's just what makes sense. If someone opts to run Windows on the desktop and all of their desktop devices, laptops, desktops everywhere, but they still have

a server they SSH into, or they still have a Raspberry Pi in the corner that runs Linux, do we consider them Linux users? We got an email into the show. Somebody says, look, I had to switch to Windows for work, but I found out that WSL has worked amazing for me. And I can get access to the Linux file system now. I can use VS Code and IntelliJ in Windows to program for Linux. It's like a near native experience as if I am on Linux, but yet I have the Windows desktop and I'm compliant with all of my work's policies. And he says, does this make me no longer a Linux user? And I think he is still a Linux user. I think if we're real with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that the Linux desktop market is tiny compared to the Linux server market and the Linux embedded market, which is ginormous.

And if you look at what makes money on Linux, it's the server market and the embedded market. And the desktop market's making money for some folks, but the server market makes real money, right? We're talking enterprise money. And that is such a larger use case that in comparison, you could remove every desktop Linux user and it would not impact anybody's bottom line that is in that market. Companies like Dell and Canonical and System76 obviously would be impacted. But when I'm talking about enterprise companies, the desktop market could literally not exist. And at least immediately, it would not impact them until development fell off a cliff. So I think we have to acknowledge that reality. And we have to acknowledge that even with, you know, desktop Linux at 1% of the market or something, we are still a tiny minority

compared to the server market, which is just unfathomably huge. I mean, you look at one company like Facebook, you've got like 20, 30,000 servers all running Linux, right? One company. So you times that across the industry, and it's just incomparable in the scale of the server market compared to the desktop market. And so I think we are kind of kidding ourselves if we say, well, if you're not running Linux on the desktop, then you're not really a Linux user. We're going to put you in this bucket over here. Like, I think our community, and this is something I really want to position the JB shows and make the JB community about. I think our community as Linux as a whole, but JB specifically, has to really be open to the idea that a Linux user is anyone who actively chooses to use it, and it might mean they're using WSL, and they're not using a full desktop distro,

or it might mean that they've got an M1, an Apple M1 Mac or something, but they've got... Say it ain't so. I know, it happens. And they've got a virtual machine, or they're SSHing into a dozen Linux servers, you know, like these, that's the real world. And while I love it on the desktop and I think Plasma makes the best desktop environment now, I think KDPlasma's tops, I got to acknowledge I'm in the minority there. And so I think it is our job to be welcoming to all types of Linux users. You know, what's curious to me, Chris, is that you've been talking about people who actively choose to use Linux, but I bet you there's a whole other subset of people who actively have to use Linux and aren't necessarily as passionate as all of us here on the show are. Those of us who are using the desktop Linux, there's an inherent passion, and that's likely the reason we came to in the first place.

likely the reason we came to in the first place. But I bet you there's a bunch of Mac users and Windows users out there who just need to use Linux to get their job done. And they don't necessarily have the same passion as we do. And they're still Linux users, aren't they? I would probably argue that a lot of Linux users are, you know, consider themselves more technical users or developers. But you know, we may, maybe, might, maybe be about to see a shift in the public perception of privacy and spying and snooping. I think every time you see a story like Apple's CSAM scanning or a story about Google locking out somebody's Google account, I think you get a few more people interested in alternatives. And yesterday, and I feel like an idiot for not remembering the person's name, but yesterday, I came across a pastor who has set up like an online telegram group for everyone now. And they are really pushing and recommending Linux

and free software. Not I don't think because they I don't even know if they know about the GPL. I couldn't tell you because I just kind of skimmed through it. But it seemed like the entire thrust of the pitch to tell people to switch to Linux was because it was the operating system that freed you from tracking and censorship and spying. And if you're worried about your privacy or you're worried about people monitoring what you're doing, even if these things weren't even 100% concerns that they really should be worried about, like Linux was the answer. And there wasn't really a conversation about its technical merits or its licensing. It was more about, well, it's, it's open source, which is okay. All right. They almost got there. And it's, it's not being audit. It's not being

tracked by Microsoft and it's not being tracked by Google and it's not being tracked by Apple in the code. They're not watching you and all that kind of, you know, really aggressive kind of worrying about the most egregious kind of spying. It solves all those problems. And what struck me about it is besides the fact that they were getting some of the details wrong is I think there was like 20,000 people in that telegram group who were clearly not technical, but were like interested in solutions to combat quote unquote big tech. interested in solutions to combat quote-unquote big tech and i mean i saw that a thousand times in that telegram group for like the few hours i hung out in there and it was people that had searched up and tried to find a solution to this problem and came across this pastor and came across this telegram channel and we're in there asking questions on what linux is and what is libre office and what is fire like they were they were getting themselves educated because of privacy concerns. And I'm sure they're not a huge group of the market, but that could be a whole area that we begin appealing to and expanding to when it comes to free software.

And in the meantime, I look at it as we just have to be as comfortable with them using as little free software as they choose. Like if they just get in and get on board with using free software, that's a win. If it's something like Linux or if it's LibreOffice or if it's even just Firefox, that's a good win. And if we kind of are shitheads about the fact that they don't run it on Linux on the desktop, it kind of acts as this kind of bouncing screen that rejects people. I get these emails into the show and that's what brings this topic up is people have written in and they've said,

you know, I feel like because I don't run it on the desktop anymore, I can't really hang out in the Telegram group or in the IRC room. And that's just totally not true. But I think there's that perception out there. Yeah, it does feel like that way. And I know, like, I mean, I'm excited about Linux on the desktop. I don't really enjoy any other desktop operating systems. But when we ask, like, what, you know, we've said Linux a lot here, but I think it applies to the broader free and open source ecosystem is every improvement that you get, every step along that way is good. So even if WSL makes us uncomfortable, which, I mean, I'll admit it does to me, too.

But that is introducing these concepts to folks. And we all have different practical realities at the end of the day. And so if we can help bridge that, if we can get people to understand that these are tools that are available for you for free, they are your tools, change them, embrace them if you want, and that they can help you regain some of the control

you might not feel you have anymore in whatever domains matter the most to you, let's do that. Because the great thing about free and open source software as well is it's not going anywhere. It can't be taken away from us. And so if it takes us another 15 years to the point where the desktop is totally irrelevant,

all the big companies are now focusing on mobile exclusively and Linux desktops become the best again, well, great, I'll celebrate that and I'll keep using it until that point regardless. Yeah, boy, well put. It's like they're not going to take it from you. And I think this is a big part of it, is as we get further and further down the road

with technology just being normalized in our daily lives, we have transitioned from, oh, isn't this a quaint toy, to I need this to do my job, or I need this to feed my family, or I need X, Y, Z for this to happen. And it's become much more critical. Technology is unavoidable if you want to participate in modern life at all. I, when I, 20 years ago, I could have family members around me who'd never used a computer. They'd never owned a computer. They never used one. They were in construction work or something like in that line. And they just never, it never came up.

And all of them now own computers. All of them know how to use a web browser. They have to fill out stuff online for work. It's changed. It's touched every profession. And I think we start rethinking about, well, this matters. Like I need to own this. I need to make sure it's not going away. I'd like to customize this. I need to make sure it's not going away. I'd like to customize this. I think there's always been some of us out there who have felt that way about our tools. And Jonathan wrote into the show and he said something and he had an email.

He touched on a couple of good things, but he said something that I think Brent and Wes, you both are going to agree with a lot. He said, the thing about desktop Linux is it has a major feature that the other desktops don't have. And that is I don't need to manage and run windows. I don't need to bother with windows as an OS and I can just use the Linux desktop and it does what I want. And you know, I, I completely felt that on this road trip because when I brought a Mac, you know,

I have a Mac and I have my ThinkPad here and the ThinkPad, every time I have turned it on, it has just gotten to work and I've gotten online, I've gotten what I needed. And the Mac, it has to like connect all these cloud services and it sits there and it pulls down data for 10, 15 minutes as it syncs a bunch of stuff with the NSURL session deprocess. And I feel like I don't own or control this machine. Like I am just using Apple's box where my ThinkPad, if I don't tell it to do something, it's not doing it. It feels to me like that sense of control alone is worth so much when in our world feels like we don't really have control over that much. I remember seeing you, Chris, sort of pulling your hair out for those 10, 15 minutes as you're just trying to get work done.

And on that limited cell signal that we had for most of the trip, that was really challenging for us. Yeah, it was my precious, precious bandwidths, my precious bandwidths. And it's just never an issue on the Linux box. Like I could make it take a bunch of bandwidth if I wanted to run updates and install them right now. It's just never an issue on the Linux box. Like I could make it take a bunch of bandwidth if I wanted to run updates and install them right now.

But it's also, you know, for better or for worse, it's not trying to coalesce a bunch of different processes in the background and use one single process to download everything. But it gave me a real sense of one is a real work tool for me and the other, well, it's a tool for sure. It runs certain applications I needed, but. I think we also have to understand that those barriers and preferences will be different.

You know, like a lot of the feedback we're addressing says like, oh, WSL works great for me. Or I can use Windows and also get a lot of the huge benefits from some of the free and open source software. And, like, to me, I get aggravated pretty quick on a Windows desktop. I mean, like, I used to admin it years ago. There's just, like, it rubs me the wrong way. But that's a personal feeling for me, and I have no place, comment, if other people aren't bothered by that

and they like to combine systems, no problem. On that question, what defines a Linux user? Is it even Linux? I think there's a question about if it's free and open source software, but I also wonder, is it also just the philosophy? Maybe all the tools you use, you're into the Adobe suite because you do a lot of video or photo editing work. And, you know, you've already got Office paid for at work, so you don't really need LibreOffice. And you don't have any servers you admin, but you still appreciate the philosophy and advocate for open source and privacy.

Does that count too? I think it does. You know, I think it's really, in so many ways, it's about certain ideas that we jive on, you know, certain approaches to solving problems we jive on. And I think that really is the commonality. All right. Well, I'd love to hear the audience's thoughts on this. Also, check some of the conversation on the Coder Radio Show at coder.show. But send us your thoughts, your emails, your feedbacks at linuxunplugged.com slash contact.

We got a form there. But let's move on. at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. We got a form there, but let's move on. One of the things we loved about elementary OS 6 is as they always do, they really kind of went the extra 10% and they made this great centralized spot where you could visualize all of the stuff

different Flatpak applications can do on your machine or on your network. And there's various tools out there that will do this and other ways to solve that problem, but we really liked the way Elementary OS did it. And now there's an app that'll let all of us have that fun. It's on Flathub and it's called FlatSeal and it lets you manage your Flatpak permissions. I mean, how this works, it is Flatpak itself, but it manages Flatpak? My head is exploding.

But honestly, this is almost, I think, something that should be required. I love Flatpak. I love that we're now getting more and more integrations into the GUI tools. But even as someone who uses most of his proprietary apps in Flatpak, the command line syntax isn't super friendly.

There's a lot of concepts going on, and having to adjust some of those permissions or get stuff to work right when you're like, well, in general, I want sandboxing. But for this app, I really don't. I want this to be more, you know, to feel more like part of my desktop. That's where FlatSeal can help you understand it without having to go read the Flatpak code base. Yeah, and it gives you a great visual conception of what the different security portals do for Flatpak and how you can turn those on and off. And it's great. Like when you got sandbox apps, why not have that kind of control and make it easy?

Because I agree with you, Wes. The Flatpak command line syntax has never been that great, in my opinion. Like Snap was way better out of the gate with the command line syntax. Definitely. better out of the gate with the command line syntax. Definitely. So again, it's called flat seal, all one word. And we'll have a link in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash what is this? 423? Yes. 423 linuxunplugged.com slash 423. I'd love your app pick submissions as well. linuxunplugged.com slash contact. If there is a great app out there that you think we should know about, that's a great way to get in front of us. You could send it other means too, like Twitter's fine and Telegram would probably work too. But

the nice thing about the contact page and why we always are pushing it here on the show is because depending on what's going on, both Wes and I can put eyes on that. Where like if you send it to one of us directly, like we might forget about it or something, but if you put it in on the contact form, we're both checking that all the time. Well, you know what? We do the Twitter thing. Brian, are you on the Twitter? You know I am. But you don't get to know what it is, because no one knows how to spell it. It's weird.

I've been thinking about getting rid of my Twitter. I've been thinking about actually just no social media, except for the show stuff and the announcements, and it's useful when you're live and that kind of thing. Well, you can keep the network account, I guess. Yeah, and the show accounts maybe. But I think such a small percentage of our audience is on social media too.

Like that's the thing. A very, very small percentage of people are actually on there. I don't know. Well, it's a big difference too. It can be useful to see trends, to see what prominent folks might be talking about. But if it's not a platform that you feel like you're engaging with to have productive discussions, and honestly we already have places like The Matrix and self-hosted

Discord and the Telegram channel where I feel like we have a much better curated set of folks who have self-selected in there to have good and respectful discussions, then yeah, it kind of makes me question what value are you getting? Well, I think the biggest value would be that when the audience does tweet at me, I can reply and it's nice, short and concise where an email

can sometimes turn into a book and it's harder to respond to a book. But, you know, tweet is limited. I don't know. I'm just on the fence. And I wonder, like, is there like a moral reason to not be on social media, too? The whole thing's really a first world problem, though, so I don't really worry too much about it, but it has been on my mind recently. But we will be there in the meantime. Brent's on social media, but he won't tell you what it is. But we may have it linked in the show notes. Wes is on there.

He may tell you what it is. It's just at Wes Payne. Yeah. When you got the last name of Payne, you don't really need a fancy Twitter handle. You know, you just go with that. I'm at Chris LAS and the LAS does not stand for an airport. It is Linux Action Show and the entire network is at Jupiter Signal. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. We'd love to have you join us live on a Tuesday. Should be back in the studio.

Oh, oh, that's going to be great. Oh, and you know what? We got to see you next Tuesday in the fridge still. Oh, that's going to be great. You've earned it, my friend. Thank you. In the meantime, you can always get the show at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. If you can make it, we do it on Tuesdays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. And we'd love to have you join us live.

And if you want to catch the live show, but you can't make it, we do make a version available for our members. So you can always become a member, support the show and get the full live stream. All right. Links to everything we talked about Linux on plug.com. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next Tuesday. Let me tell you, we have been driving hard. I don't know if you've been watching the tracker at all, but we ended up spending a couple of more days in Tucson as we waited for the work to get done and then to leave. And so we cooked for a couple more days,

and then we hit the road in a way we haven't done in a couple of years, 10, 13 hour drive days back to back. And one of our goals was to make it to the coast as fast as possible because that's where the temperature dropped. It goes from like 106 around noon to 65 Fahrenheit around noon at the coast. And so Hadiya and I just drove like maniacs for a couple of days and beelined it. The rig limped the entire way with a lean and half working suspension on one side, but it was working and just got all the way to the coast. And it was incredible to see the Pacific Ocean again. I had an emotional reaction when I came around the corner and I saw the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing.

The breeze, the smell, just the cold ocean air. Yeah. And the evergreen trees are so beautiful. It's so nice to be back up. You're home. Yeah. And now I'm in Southern Oregon. I was in Northern California.

Now I'm in Southern Oregon. And it's the pacific northwest it's so gorgeous it's so great it feels so good it's like 55 degrees at night now it's so much more comfortable and i am so so proud of jupes i mean she you know she had some technical problems with the suspension but we were cooking from day one when we left Seattle, there was a heat dome and it was hot everywhere we went. Everywhere we went, it was low 90s to triple digits. And it did not relent until we made it to the California coast and JOOPS held up. I mean, if this wasn't the ultimate stress test for JOOPS, I feel like now you're pretty prepared for whatever climate catastrophe is to come.

Bring on the zombies. Yeah, dude, totally. Just need a push bar and I'm good to go.