LINUX Unplugged - 432: Three Tumbleweed Temptations

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Can we live with openSUSE Tumbleweed? We try three different builds and prepare ourselves for our journey into SUSE land. Our setups, what we liked, and what we still need to figure out.

Oh, there he is. Good. Good. I thought maybe you had a power outage or something. You know, something crazy. No, I don't know. Internet outage maybe blipped there? I'm back now.

I'm the one with the bad internet. Jeez. Did you get a good silence capture on your side? Way too long. I didn't realize what was happening, so I just kept going. It's in there holding your breath. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Good to see you again. It is our weekly get-together, and this episode is brought to you by CloudGuru, the leader in learning for Cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. They have hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs. certified get higher get learning at a cloud guru.com but coming up on the show today you voted and we're doing it open seuss tumbleweed will be landing on our new garage server soon

but we have a big twist this week and i will tell you but it's good news it's not bad it is good news we'll tell you more about that in a little bit. But this week's all about preparing our minds and bodies for a trip into SUSE land. So this week we are preparing for that journey and figuring out what needs to be on our route, sharing our current test setups that we've built, what we've learned, what we still need to figure out,

and who of us is still actually running Tumbleweed as we do this episode. But first, we got to say hello to our virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, hello. Hello. Hello, Wes and Chris. Hello.

Something tells me we'll need your help today, Mumble Room. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be one of those. So while we're talking about the Seuss, let's talk about the 2021 Tuxee nominations, because, yeah, they're open again. And we need you to go vote for the best free software project, the real standout distro of the year, your text editor that you just loved this year, a new project that came along that really blew you away, a strong server distro and a lot more. It's all in a probably three to four minute survey that we've built on a next cloud box that you can go take. minute survey that we've built on a next cloud box that you can go take. And right now I'm a little suspicious. Wes can let's actually, let's, let's do a little aside here.

Wes, the cone of science. Watch your hands on the cone, man. I know, I know I had to make room for Brent. Thanks guys. So we have a problem, I think. And I don't really know if it's genuinely a problem or what we should do. And I don't want the audience to have doubt in the sanctity of the tuxes. But it seems very strange to me how far ahead SUSE is pulling in the various areas where SUSE is an option right now.

Oh, are you are you suggesting some sort of foul play? Lizard foul play, perhaps. I mean, I was suspicious with the survey around the server, and then I got word that it was shared around internally. And I'm just, I'm wondering. We've got a lot of great answers, but whenever Seuss is an option, it's number one in every category. It could just be that there's some sort of Seuss fever sweeping the audience. Here's what we'll do.

Let's just, we don't want to tell the audience, obviously. Don't want to spoil anything. We don't want to concern them. We want them to trust the sanctity of the Tuxy. So what I'm thinking we do is we'll just compel them to go vote by offering free cookies at the voting booths. And then, you know, hopefully we just get more numbers and to sort of wash it all out. Yeah. Hmm.

Yeah. That seems pretty doable. Brent, you better get bacon, buddy. Okay. Yeah. No kidding. The cone of silence. So, yeah, the 2021 Tuxy nominations are open.

And at the various polling booths right now, we are handing out free cookies for no other reason than we just want to get as many people out. Oh, it seems we've had 407 responses. So let's see if we can't double that by next episode. It means everybody's going to have to get out and go vote. You can find a link in our show notes to participate or go to tuxes.party. And also, our first use of NextCloud for something like this. All right, all right. There's going to be some more Zeus later on in the show.

Let's do some community news first. Steam valve activated. So we may, by this time next year, be talking about how SteamOS is the next up-and-coming Linux desktop environment. Now hear me out. Hear me out. So I got some bad news. We learned this week that the deck was going to be delayed until February 2021. So a two-month delay. But in that same batch of news, we also learned that SteamOS, which is Arch-based,

is going to use an immutable file system. Will SteamOS have a read-only immutable OS file system? Yes. So by default, the updates, the OS updates will be distributed as a whole OS image. But you can enter a developer mode, which will let you modify the file system and install packages like a normal distribution. So this is sort of like Silverblue or KinoNite or Ubuntu Core, only it's a full modern Plasma Wayland-based desktop produced valve. That's going to have a safe reversible update mechanism. Thanks to this immutable file system and then support for flat packs to add applications without even having to turn those protections off. Isn't this what we've been asking for for a very long time is some large

vendor to use plasma and build a professional grade workstation. They've taken like the ideal Arch workstation and brought it to the next level by adding an immutable file system, in my opinion. I don't know that they'd say they're targeting the workstation, but yeah, I see where you're going with this. I mean, we also kind of suspected they might have to do this, whether it was their own repository or, I guess, as it seems,

some kind of image-based solution. They were going to need some kind of stability layer on top of Arch. And I think, what, you're just hoping then that the way they do it will be, in the usual way of open source, a way that, say, a Garuda user over here could take advantage of. Well, it's not my idea. It's actually Linus Torvald's idea. He said it years ago. He said it's going to take a vendor like Valve, literally what he said, it's going to take a vendor like Valve to product up the Linux desktop and make it usable by average users. And here's what I actually expect would happen.

For people like you and I, we would probably be using some sort of open community fork of SteamOS that is packaging it up for a workstation. It includes the immutable OS and the Arch patches and all of that, but maybe it doesn't automatically boot into big picture mode or whatever they're going to call it. So it's probably a community fork of the term, maybe loosely using the term fork, is what I would expect happens. Do you gentlemen have any guesses on what's under the hood,

making all this possible? Not totally, no. I'm actually really curious to get my hands on it. They say they won't release it until after the deck is released. So I was hoping they'd release it sooner so we could start kind of understanding how the deck works before it ships. Because I think that would actually, you know, having a community out there that kind of understands the underpinnings of that thing may actually help it be more successful. But I think Valve's just kind of like focused on getting the deck out. And that's where all efforts are. And they're not they don't want to spend the time packaging it up to distribute it to the community yet.

Yeah, you get it over the wall and then maybe you clean things up. I get that. Minimac, you had an experience with an OS that does this too. So the base system is in fact in LXD, LXD, LXD containers. So it doesn't allow you to change the system, which has a really cool thing offer because it allows you to switch from stable to experimental and back. You just change the container and then you just continue and your data is in a separate container.

So that's pretty cool. Yeah, it gives you a nice escape hatch. It really does kind of make a workstation a little more bulletproof. I wonder if they are just going to use OSTree and they do end up just using flat packs for application distribution, which is kind of admittedly how it looks on the surface right now. That could mean that they're planning to probably offer some, maybe they could offer some of that stuff outside of SteamOS as well.

And Valve is officially packaging it in these different channels. A lot of things are going to change for gaming on Linux after this because the other part of this is the games that do publish through Steam can opt in to take advantage of the Steam Deck verified program. And Valve will test how the game performs in Proton now before the developers have actually even released it. So while not every game will take advantage of this, and not every game ships through Steam, a lot more will. And so that means like a hell of a lot more games are just going to have Linux support one way or another on day one

once the deck is launched, even if you never buy a deck, it's just great news for all desktop Linux users. Yeah, really, like you get that so much, hopefully so much earlier in the cycle, right? Like when you're starting to think about these things, when you're thinking about the publishing process, rather than after the fact, when, you know, a very small little niche of users, maybe start emailing you asking for support. Yeah, do it before you're all in on using MSHTML when you can still switch over to a different open web render. We went into a lot more detail in this week's Linux Action News

and including some of the nuances around things developers are going to run into when they do try to do this. It's not as rosy as the initial announcement makes it seem, but it's not impossible either. So we have details in there. Okay, so this week I was really disappointed in some behavior that I saw online by Rocky Linux in a couple of ways. And I normally wouldn't even talk about this kind of thing on air. I'd probably just grouse about it to the guys behind the mic

and move on. But December is approaching and the transition from centos traditional to stream and then in the life of the traditional product is soon and all of the rel clones are technically very similar if they weren't they'd be failing at their job and there's a lot more out there between just alma and rocky i think probably oracle has probably the other most famous. Of course, we all remember ones like Scientific Linux as well. Today, when I was grabbing one more ISO before the show, I wanted to grab the transactional OpenSUSE ISO. I was lazy and I just went to Google and I just searched OpenSUSE download. And this is really gross to me. What I got were a bunch of paid links by Greg's company for Rocky Linux, in my opinion, click-checking OpenSUSE users, trying to redirect them to Rocky Linux.

And it just feels really gross because they're not taking ads out to try to grab clicks from SUSE Enterprise Linux. They're trying to go after the free community OpenSUSE. And that just seems out of bounds to me. And I would hope that a distribution that's going to have the prominence and position in the community that Rocky might have one day would understand how awful and demotivating that is to people behind the project. And I know for a fact it is. How do you think the people behind these projects feel when Greg's company, so that way Rocky doesn't do it directly, right? Or maybe they can't. When Greg's company, CICQ or whatever the hell it is, goes out there and buys this stuff and clickjacks from OpenSUSE.

Now, probably minimal impact, let's be honest. But it doesn't look good, and it's definitely not in the spirit of free software and community. And, boy, it probably feels bad if it is successful, if the campaign were successful, which you would think the Rocky folks would want their campaign to be successful, you would think they would want their investment to be worthwhile. It would mean less downloads for OpenSUSE. What does that mean for the project? And then what also is just very, very disappointing about this entire thing. A week or two ago, Rocky Linux held an AMA. It was fine. A few things in there I disagreed with, but you know, it's their moment to interact with the community. Today, Alma Linux

held an AMA. And of course, Greg is in there stirring crap up. While the Alma folks stayed completely out of the Rocky AMA, Greg's in there throwing bombs. And in that AMA, he essentially calls me a liar saying that screenshot's from months ago, which is crap. I do have a screenshot from months ago, back when they were doing this to Alma. At the end of July, they did the same thing against Alma. But that feels a little different. That's at least competitor to competitor.

I don't think it's a good look, but it feels inbounds. But the screenshot today of the Rocky Linux ads when I searched for OpenSUSE were from just hours ago. Not only do I have the file timestamp on my hard drive but I immediately shared it in our team chat

and I have the timestamp on that from this morning because I was getting ready for the show this morning. And Greg in the AMA says I'm lying about that that it's from months ago, that they don't do that anymore. So either he's completely unaware of what his company does and

what they're doing on behalf of his company for the distribution that he's now launched, or he's lying. Either one's not a good look. And again, I come back to these rel clones are technically identical. So what makes the difference long-term is the team structure and the people behind the distribution that's why this matters right now and maybe you've noticed i've noticed rocky seems to have been late on every rel beta and release compared to alma so maybe in my opinion they should focus less on scamming people into using their distribution and instead, in my opinion, work more on their release pipeline and their release timeline. I just find the whole thing gross. One of the big questions I have is, you know, that's only the stuff you noticed.

That's one person noticing one thing. Where else are they putting ads? You know, who else are they trying to steal stuff from? I don't know that much about the projects, but the more I learn, um, feels a little disappointing. I want them both to succeed and they're doing something a little bit different, but geez, I know. Come on. I would say, ultimately, I felt like we had a moment here for a real enterprise community that included all of these clones and, you know, the going in the AMA and dropping bombs. And then later on calling me a liar. Like, why, why would you do that?

Why would you go in there and call me a liar like that? It's not from months ago. And why would I claim it's from this morning if it wasn't, if it wasn't like the whole thing is, it's extremely disappointing. And you're coming at me when I've got not only the receipts, but I've got an audience and a platform too. It just doesn't make any sense. And it just seems, it just seems reactionary and it seems crass and miscalculated from the very beginning. Doesn't really address the root of

the issue either, right? Like, okay, even if, even if somehow you were wrong, like you're still doing it in the past. Have you really addressed that? Yeah, that's gotta be what it was, right? It's like drop a bomb here so that way you're not paying attention to what was actually going down over here. I mean, it's hard to say. It's definitely, this whole thing is, is unfortunate. It's just our experiences. So, you know, one of the very first questions that I saw in that AMA this morning when I was, you know, waking up and doing the online thing was, what is the difference between Alma and Rocky? And that's an excellent question from the audience. And the Alma team had a great description. And they said, oh, yeah, we're doing slightly different things.

Here's what's different about it. And they were almost celebrating the fact that they both existed. And it was really refreshing to see. And I didn't see any of the updates since then, but it's really disappointing to hear which direction that took. And it's clouding sort of almost chance to connect with the community, it sounds like. Well put. We'll have a link to that AMA though, because there is some really good information and some good questions answered in there. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and you go there to support the show. So it's Linode.com slash unplugged.

It's where we've built everything that we call infrastructure in the last couple of years. It's how I host everything that needs to run on Linux. in the last couple of years. It's how I host everything that needs to run on Linux. Just for this episode alone, Wes is going to go into detail about how he was able to leverage all of the tools that Linode gives you to do a custom install of SUSE on Linode.

And I wanted to actually mention this because a big usage for us with Linode is an R&D lab because the systems are just wicked fast. They're just wicked fast. They're just wicked fast. They have brand new MBME storage they're rolling out. They have 40 gigabit connections

coming into the hypervisor. And then for the distros they support, they locally mirror the repos. So when you do an update, the updates slam down to your rig so fast, it's faster than your SSH terminal could update the output of the package manager. And then when you're pulling anything off the internet, it's just stupid fast. It's faster than your SSH terminal could update the output of the package manager. And then when you're pulling anything off the internet, it's just stupid fast. And then because

they have 11 data centers around the world to choose from, you can pick something that's close to you. So I often will pick something here on the West Coast when we're doing an R&D lab thing, because even with my Comcast connection, I just get an incredibly fast, low latency connection to Linode. And then if we're doing something that the audience is going to bang on, I'll generally more centrally deploy it. It's so great. And every step along the way, I never feel like I'm being limited by the tooling. Like if we got to the point, which we did this week, where we just wanted to replace the OS and deploy something that they don't have in the dropdown selection, we could do it. And I've done that before for my own mesh VPN

system. And I don't often have to do that. It seems like maybe about once a year, I get down to the metal. And I, every time I am just so grateful that Linode doesn't hide that stuff, doesn't prevent that stuff. In fact, we follow a guide from Linode on how to do it. Then on top of that, of course, they've got the one-click deployment of an entire stack that you can just get up and get running. Generally, what they'll do is they'll have you just fill out a couple of questions about how you want it set up, like in the case of, say, like a GitLab server or a Minecraft server or a lot of these. You can fill out a couple of fields, hit deploy, and you've got a system ready to go. So you can go that one-click

route as well. You have that full range, and it works, and it's so fast, and you've got a system ready to go. So you can go that one-click route as well. You have that full range, and it works, and it's so fast, and it's so reliable, and then it's just so straightforward to put it in production, and then know that you can turn on those Linode backups, and you got it. And if you ever just need to grow your storage, like we've had that problem, where we're like, we need more disk. They've got object storage, you can easily add more block storage, and it's all just so fast. On top of that, they have high-end CPU and high memory and even GPU rigs. And they're rolling out bare metal as well. And their VLAN support is slick. God, it's so cool now when you set up a Linode.

Like I can join them to the VLANs. I can add the SSH keys. I can do all this stuff that just makes it so quick to get in and get going and start building. So go try it out and really put that $100 to work. That's going to really let you try this thing out. See what we've been saying. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to support the show and get yourself $100 in credit for a new account.

Linode.com slash unplugged. All right, well, let's try to find something a little more positive to talk about. Chris, we had quite the development over the weekend. I think we should probably catch the audience up on. You know, Wes, we have really, it's cliche for people to say, oh, we have the best audience, but we really, truly have the best audience. No comparison. So we had a listener bring us up another Dell server this weekend,

and I didn't grab all the specs. So I will go into it in a, in a, when we're getting, when we actually do the bill, I'll go into the details, but we got another Dell server loaded up and ready to go. We have two systems that are honestly probably nicer than what I would have bought both of them. And now we have two of them that have been given to us by different audience members. And it just, it's so awesome because of course, you of them. And now we have two of them that have been given to us by different audience members. And it just, it's so awesome because of course, you know, this means now we can do some backups. We can do some fun things with, with all kinds of different projects. I mean, the possibilities and the directions we can take that for the show and the, and the content and ideas that we're going to have in the lab.

And it's just, it's so awesome. And so, uh, yeah, we had a great, we had a great experience this weekend while Wes and I were recording Linux Action News. We took a break and broke lunch with this listener and they dropped off the server for us and we chatted for a bit and then got back to doing LAN. And now it's sitting here and I'm just looking at it. I just can't believe it. We have two of these beautiful big servers and we have a lot in store that's going to be kicking off really soon. So today was really all about us getting oriented with OpenSUSE because we've all taken cracks

at it before. I don't know exactly. I can't remember if we did Leap or Tumbleweed in the past, but we really were looking at the desktop of OpenSUSE. Don't think I'd ever run OpenSUSE on a server like properly, you know, more than for, you know, just boot the ISO and check things out or something. Yeah, I mean, I'd done SLESS a lot back in the day, the enterprise product, but never OpenSUSE as a server and never Tumbleweed as a server. But that was what the audience voted for, for our new server.

So we wanted to get oriented. And, Wes, you took the route of deploying it on Linode, but just with one hitch, Linode doesn't have Tumbleweed as an option. No, no, they don't. And, you know, I don't know. I wanted to go out there this time, so I thought, when we first started thinking, we better get prepared for this. Like, we're not ready to design the layout

for these servers yet, because we haven't, you know, we're not familiar with the operating system enough. So we've been playing with it, and we both saw that there was this transactional server set up that you could do. We didn't try it at the time, but I thought, all right, this time, this time I'm going to do it. But yeah, Linode doesn't have Tumbleweed, let alone the transactional server version of it.

And after playing with Kinoite the other day with Fedora 35, I was hooked. I had to try it. Now, they do have Leap on Linode? Yeah. That's probably what you should really do. Like, if you're going to do this properly, you're not going to do it the weird West way. They have an upgrade path where you can go from Leap to Tumbleweed.

We'll have some instructions linked in the doc if you want to play it. But that seemed a little too straightforward to me. That's boring. So, instead, I decided I'd boot up a Fedora 35 box. Of course. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. Why Fedora

35? My instinct would be go get a Tumbleweed ISO and boot that. Why did you go Fedora 35? Oh, you'll see. So. Okay. Alright. I got my Fedora 35 going, you know, quick and easy on Linode. It's great. And then I downloaded the Tumbleweed network installer. They have a little

network installer and I always love these, right? Because you're going to get the fresh packages anyway. Why not just start with the minimal thing that you need? Mounted that ISO, and then I used my old friend Keixec to get things started. And that's why, that's why I picked Fedora 35, because I know Fedora ships with Keixec right out of the box, and I just, I just love that. Which also, hey, Tumbleweed does too, so that's great. I should have known. I don't even know why I doubted. I should have known. So you k-exec from Fedora into Tumbleweed?

Yes. I wasn't really sure how this was going to work. I did kind of prototype it a little bit in QEMU on my local machine, and it seemed viable. What really made this possible, though, was that Linode has a graphical web console you can use. So I was able to just pop up in SSH, run KEXEC, and then do sudo systemctl KEXEC to get things going.

And, of course, my connection drops there, but I can go onto Linode, boot up the graphical console, watch the darn thing boot, and then I was greeted by, like, the normal YAST graphical installer, just like I was installing it here locally at my house. That's great. I was going to say, like, I think you probably could have made it easier and just gone with the ISO, but that sounds a lot more your style. And so then do you take over that system or are you still just K-exact? How is that working?

Well, yeah. So now I'm just running the installer kernel in RamFS and it kind of like has just enough in there to go onto the internet, DHCP, you know, that's the nice part is it's really just like running in a data center, it has the stuff it needs so it can just totally, it just bootstrapped itself and presented me with a normal screen of like hey, what do you want to install here? Now did you go with the transactional

system or did you go with the traditional server? Because you have two options now when you're installing OpenSUSE. Yeah, I went with the transactional this time. I thought, why not, right? The stuff seems like it's eventually going to be the way in one form or another, and I want to see the Tumbleweed and the

OpenSUSE take on this. I will say, I do really like the YAST installer. It might be my favorite installer. I don't know. It is a lot. There's a lot going on there, but I was impressed that it was willing to go grab existing SSH keys off the Fedora 35 install. That was nice, right? Because

Linode has an option. You can just pre-check the SSH keys some of the JB team members have put in there. I didn't have to give those up even though I was overriding the whole darn server. Wow. That's awesome, actually. You know what I liked about the installer is that summary at the end, like it says firewall on, SELinux off,

you know, CPU mitigations on, and they're linked. So you could just click it and adjust the setting right there. And I'm like, yeah, you know what? I don't want my firewall on and I don't want CPU mitigations in this VM. So no, turn them off. That was great. It's definitely a lot, but I think it was a nice balance too. And that like, it felt very intuitive in a way that I know I harp on this way too much, but in a way that like Anaconda just never has for me. Poor Anaconda. Yeah. It felt to me like the interface was hiding a bunch of super user features right where you needed them. Like they weren't in your face, but if you wanted them, they're just a click away, which I really appreciate it too. Yeah, definitely. Did you do anything update wise and see how the transactional stuff works and

snapshots work? Did you suss that out? Yes, I did. Okay, so I got it installed, and then it was reboot time. And at first I was pretty worried that, dang it, I shouldn't have gone this route. It wasn't going to work, because when I rebooted, I was just met with a blank rescue grub screen. But I think actually this is just like a little thing. I saw some issues around when these similar changes

happened to the grub setup in the Fedora land, I think around Fedora 30. And it's just something about the way Linode specifically boots and the Grub config it expects. So I was able to just hit exit and get to the Grub install that OpenSUSE had set up. And that worked just fine. So this is probably another reason,

don't do it the way that I did. I don't think I would have run into this if I hadn't moved off the IntraMFS and the Linode kernel that are specifically set up to handle the boot process. But other than that, it's just worked. I mean, I was, you know, I agreed with the system,

had kegsec already there running, set up, ready to go, which was great. Not that I needed it anymore. And I was like, okay, what do I want to try with this? What do I normally do on a server? And, of course, one of the first things we end up doing for JB tests are getting some containers running. I knew you were going to go the classic, just go get Docker around.

So I thought, I'm going to try Podman this time around. Because I was like, I'm pretty sure OpenSUSE just has that packaged. And I found some docs for getting containers going, getting rootless containers going, which is always neat with Podman. And I wanted to see if Tumbleweed had, you know, the Podman working with some of that Docker Compose socket support that they added recently.

And, of course, the first thing you got to do is install a darn package. I will say, getting Docker Compose, you know, you'll probably touch on this, but it was kind of confusing in some ways. But I really like that they have the command not found helper installed

and that you're prompted by it if you try to run something that isn't there. That just needed to happen once for me where it was like, hey, you don't have that command, but you can run this to figure out which, you know, run CNF, and it'll tell you which packages you can install to get it. And I've used that so many times already

just in the short time I've been playing with this. It's great. It's an interesting setup because it's a little unique in some ways, being transactional, but also Podman instead of Docker. That's a fun combination. Did you run into any kind of snags? So the biggest thing is with the transactional updates, it works well. You're going to use the transactional-update command. No surprise there, right? And they've got a management page that the dash dash help menu is pretty normal. And they've got some stuff you can exec into a snapshot

to make some other customizable changes or you can run sort of a command you might expect to say transactional update package install and then it's going to go do all the stuff behind the scenes to like create a new snapshot based on the previous one set it all up, truit in there, run zipper inside that get your packages installed, rejigger the system so that on your next boot that's what you'll boot into and that's the one part that I think is going to be a pretty big learning curve

or something I needed to get used to. And I'm sure there's lots of tricks, right? I'm definitely new to this whole setup. But after each of your transactional updates, you got to reboot. And if you don't, or you want to like, I wasn't sure by default how to stack multiple updates without reboots in between all of them. And that I could see getting kind of annoying, at least for one-off machines. You know, on a system where you're running some sort of configuration management or building images, you're not worrying about that, no big deal at scale. But for me, continuing to mess up, it was easy to me to be like, oh, I installed that package,

and then I didn't realize that execing in there and messing about, or installing a separate package before rebooting could actually overwrite the changes, or at least make it so that the snapshot, the way that they inherited from each other was off, and what I rebooted into didn't actually have the commands I was expecting. Oh, I could totally see making that mistake. So it sounds like maybe you think we shouldn't go transactional for our server? Well, no, I just think if you do, you just got to kind of be all in and maybe it takes some of your initial setup time, your play time longer, or maybe you have a prototyping system that isn't transactional that you kind of learn on. So you've got it down. Because after that, like once I got Docker

Compose and Podman installed, which really like was just me learning the system enough to like run the right command and install them both at the same time or install them and reboot in between, then it just worked. Like, you know, system CTL, enable the socket, and I got a Docker Compose project up and running, no problem. So after that point, it's been a totally fine server. I wonder if we should use

Podman in our deployment then. That's kind of what I was thinking. I'd be down for that. Okay then. I think we just committed. Let's try it. I mean, what's the worst that happens? Right, we've got a backup if we have to abandon ship, we'll abandon ship and fess up on the air, of course. But's try it. I mean, what's the worst that happens? Right, we've got to back up. If we have to abandon ship, we'll abandon ship and fess up on the air, of course. But yeah, right? I mean, it's coming along,

and we get fresh Podman with Tumbleweed, so let's take advantage of it. Yeah, I wonder if anybody out there knows of any major problems using Podman on Tumbleweed. I suppose let us know at linuxunplugged.com slash contact before we do it. Brett, you had a pretty snapping time, and you tried out the Plasma desktop

being a Plasma gentleman yourself. How did your adventures in the Seuss land go? I think they went fairly well. I tried to apply the exact same approach as I did with our Fedora 35 review that we did a few episodes ago. So I just stuck to the desktop because that's most of what I know. I let you guys do all the crazy stuff. And I had all the same thoughts about the installer. It was kind of, well, everything we've already mentioned. What was really new to me and what I really wanted to dive into was the software updates. You know, the whole reason to run Tumbleweed is for that. As far as I understand it thus far with the reading I've been doing and some help from various people is that ButterFS

allows you to do some really nice sort of snapshotting stuff at boot. So you can install the rolling. So as far as I understand, it's a rolling release that is very well tested, which really appeals to me, as you know, Chris. And having those snapshots in there is nice because my understanding is that it will take a snapshot on like a system update. So you could, in theory, revert back. And yeah, I think it's using Butterfest and Snapper to do all of that in the backend. You have like a lot of different snapshot technologies out there and we've touched on a couple of them.

You have transactional updates, which are like entire images that you switch at boot. And then you have snapshots, which are file system snapshots that capture a current or certain state of the OS. And you have ZFS snapshots and Butterfest. It goes on and on and on. But yeah, Butterfest snapshots. And I think they're using a tool called Snapper.

They are. That's what I read about thus far. But I guess either way, essentially what you need to know is there is a bit of an insurance policy when you're using this system. So unlike Arch, where it's rolling with no suspenders, this is rolling with suspenders. Yeah. And I have run Arch for a few years previously, and I moved away from that because of it felt inherently risky on a daily basis. And while that's fun, if you're trying to get stuff done, you know, on your main machine, that feels... Did it ever really actually bite you though? Oh yeah. Oh, it did. Okay. And partly my fault, I think. Some of the ways I set it up with disk encryption and stuff

led to some issues. So fair enough. Lots of learning there. But that was the whole point of running Arch at the time was to learn. But having this snapshot functionality feels like I can dive into that full steam ahead again, which I've missed, but without, I don't know, without that feeling that I might just drown when I need to be floating, you know, and get stuff done. It just makes you feel a little more comfortable actually proceeding with updates and whatnot. Like you're not dreading it. Yeah. And I noticed the more that I dove into how it worked and reading some of the documentation, the more this like deeply curious and excited, like younger version of me started coming out. And I really, really appreciated that. I think that probably colors my testing of OpenSUSE, but that in such a wonderful way. So I then decided to go a little crazy and set up my microphone and our recording for this episode on that test laptop, because I

thought, what the heck, let's bring it to the next level. And if I'm, maybe I'm going to throw this out there. If I'm considering maybe moving to this distribution sort of as my main setup, may as well try it on the show, right? I didn't expect we'd be matchmakers today, Chris. Wow. Yeah, I know. And that's an interesting outcome of it. Wes, are you still on Tumbleweed now or are you on your regular machine?

Yes, yes, I am. So both of you are Tumbleweeding. I'm not. I actually still have my VMs that I'll get into going, though. Brent, did you get a chance at all to experience the essence of YAST? So as far as I understand from listening to, I did dive into a few talks at conferences. I wanted to get some of the history of OpenSUSE because I just didn't have much experience with it. So I dove

into a bunch of like historical documentation and talks and stuff. And it sounds to me like Yast is controversial, or at least people didn't like it a long time ago, or it didn't keep up. And apparently, as far as I understand, Yast 2 is kind of the thing we're dealing with now. And I got to say, it was really nice. I didn't have any issues with it. I did see some slightly confusing naming conventions. Like, for instance, there's an application called YAST Online Update, which it took me a long time to figure out what that did. I'm still a little confused about that. Apparently, it's used to get patches to correct and improve your existing installation.

So maybe in a week or two, I'll figure that one out. But for the most part, yeah, it was great. Yeah, I think that's just the updater. But yeah, right. It is a weird. So I prefer to use Zipper on the command line myself. So yeah, it's I think it's a it's a classic GUI tool versus command line tool kind of debate. We should talk about Zipper, though, because I feel like in the past I was skeptical, but I kind of like it. I haven't really used it in anger yet. And admittedly, this most recent time has been kind of wrapped in the transactional update stuff. But I don't know what I have done with it recently. It hasn't been bad.

Yeah, I agree. You know, my cards on the table here, it was the transition to zipper that made me leave, leave, Seuss. Way back when. So I was just done. I was done at that point. There had been a couple of other package manager transitions. Plus, I was trying to use red carpet and RPM dependency resolution was a real nightmare back then. And I was just done.

And apt was a thing. Yum was a thing. And Mandrake had URPMI, which was also really nice. And so I was done when Zipper came along. But this time around, I found the Zipper cheat sheet that the project publishes. And I don't know if it's, I think it's current, but it worked for me. It's just great. I'll have a link in the show notes. It's just a PDF. Man, this is the way to go. And, you know, I think what trips me up is I've been surprised

that in some areas they didn't adopt a more common syntax. Like they use the word refresh instead of update, where if you use DNF and apt a lot, you're just DNF update, apt get update. But I would actually argue that the convention in apt seems a little awkward. I would assume it's only nice for you because it's familiar, but for someone coming at each fresh,

I think refresh makes a lot more sense because you're- You're right. In that sense, if you come at it clean, but you know what? I think when we do user studies a lot, what we commonly see is that turns out people have been using systems for a while now. And if, if something's been really popular, like say a start menu and a task bar and things like that,

like those conventions become so well understood by the general population that if you want to provide them a low friction transition, you adopt some of those conventions, even if they aren't necessarily the ones you would always come up with. If're starting anew. It's, you know, there's always, it's a balance and it works. It's fine. It's just once you know those little differences, right? And that's where I think the having the map, like the cheat sheet, that makes that really great. And then once you have that, it's, I think it's a nice tool to use. It's got good display and output. It's quick. I'd say it's quicker than DNF. I liked it from that standpoint, but I do have that, like that old school, like, oh, I can't believe we're doing another package manager transition.

That was actually one of the items I was most hesitant about in doing some of these distribution tests in the last few weeks is package management. I don't have that much, I actually don't have that much experience with them. I've used apt and Arch has forced me to, you know, do the Pac-Man thing for a while, but I didn't know any of the RPM based ones. And that I have to admit was the source of my biggest fears at all of this. I thought, geez, if I just, I can't even update packages or anything like that, I'm going to look pretty silly online trying this stuff out. But it turns out they're all pretty friendly these days. And that wasn't my experience, you know, a decade ago when I played with all this stuff.

So I was actually pleasantly surprised and continue to be impressed. You know, speaking from a desktop perspective, too, like the last time I used SUSE pretty seriously, Flatpak and Flathub weren't a thing. And that makes a difference now, too. Kind of changes the software availability story that used to be a big deciding factor between the distributions. Yeah, no kidding, right? Like, there's this one layer of, I don't know,

more server-centric tooling, kind of like base system tooling that we're talking about. And, of course, there's the Open Build service, which we haven't really talked about today. But you're right, like, for just day-to-day, the dumb business applications I got to use, Flatpak has totally changed that and probably in a fantastic way for us distro hoppers. And then on the server application side, using things like Podman and Docker means that how you run and install software is sort of been normalized. And so then you start looking

at, okay, now what else differentiates a distro? Well, now I'm kind of paying attention to the fact that I kind of like the way they set up the console by default. I kind of like that they're using ButterFS to do these snapshots. And it's kind of handy that Zipper's quick, because when I do have to use the host system, I'd like

every interaction to be as quick as possible. And so for my test setup, because I'm also always kind of thinking long-term about what my next build in Lady Jube's, my RV is going to be right now. I'm very happy with Ubuntu 2004 on a couple of Raspberry Pis. It's been really good. But gosh, that's so LTS. How long can you last? I know I'm always kind of shopping for the next thing. And for my workloads, a rolling OS wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing because everything, again, on that is in a container. And the LTS has plenty of updates. So it's not like I don't need to log in and do updates all the time on the LTS.

So I thought, you know, what else? So CentOS Stream 9 is very high on my list. And Tumbleweed, or maybe Leap, but probably Tumbleweed is also on that list. And so I was curious what their ARM image release is like, because some distributions really half-ass this, and some distributions treat it like a first-class citizen. Like I really, I've been very impressed with Fedora 35 ARM and the Ubuntu ARM. And now I am also very impressed by the OpenSUSE server ARM image.

I felt like there was no penalty for being on an ARM box. I had a great experience. I booted up that ISO. I got it going. I almost went transactional server like US. I almost did. But there's a wiki post that explains some of the drawbacks. And I don't know how current that is, but I read through some of that and I thought, hmm, no, I think I won't. But I'll link to that in the show notes if you're curious. Yeah, it's probably a lot, especially like, as you say, you're still learning a new package manager. There's a lot going on that you don't understand

about like what's different than the Linux systems I know. I think adding, learning both of those at the same time, probably not the best idea. So that's why you did it. I love it. But yeah, I figured, yeah, okay, I won't. And I appreciated them making that kind of, you know, the drawbacks kind of very, very clear. And they weren't necessarily anything too serious.

But so I had set up a couple of hosts. I set one up as a Docker host, and I set up one as a Samba. So two virtual machines. I did all this in a VM. And the Docker host was interesting. I set it up twice. The first time I went through, I did it all by hand. You know, just what's it like?

You know, I'm going to do this on my own and not look for any help and not ask anybody, you know, that stupid mentality. Well, I decided to do that, and, of course, I had trouble figuring out which version of Docker Compose packages to install. I loaded up YAST. I went into the software manager because I wasn't fully, I hadn't found the cheat sheet yet. And so I go in there and I search for Docker and I find the Docker packages.

Okay, great. And then like in the app software manager in the incurses terminal interface, when you select a package, you get like a check, but then they have a dash and they have a slash. And I used to know what those mean, but I have no idea. I'm pretty sure I know what a check is. So I got, I got them checked. And then I went over to

the search and i type in docker compose and nothing comes up well that's weird so i type in docker dash compose three results oh okay well i search is hard i needed a dash okay three results though well what are these three results and they are three different results that correspond to different versions of Python that you could hypothetically have installed on your system. And I don't, at that moment, while I'm in that search, I don't know what version of Python I, I assume it's the latest because I'm on a rolling distro. So I choose the one that has the highest number. I mean, that's how I'm building my server at this point is that one's a high number. I'll choose that one. And I hit install and I go to run a Docker compose file.

I say, you know, Docker compose up and I get a whole bunch of errors because I had wrongfully assumed that the service would automatically be started. So the second time I, and I got everything up and going and eventually figured it out, got my user ad to the group, all that kind of stuff. The second time through though, I wanted to see what the, what the documentation was like, what the community guides were like. And I went out and I found, I think it's actually on their official wiki, but if it's not, it's really well done. That explains very briefly and very simply what zipper commands to get, and then the user group had commands and all that stuff.

And so I, you know, the second time through using this concise guide, I probably had a Docker environment up in about two minutes at the most. So it was really a lot smoother going that way. Also, the Samba box was a total cinch to get going. I used to build these all the time on Sless, so that was kind of my comfort zone. But what I noticed about Yast, they've like dialed it down a little bit. It does less stuff. I think as the general Linux ecosystem, like the kernel does more system visa thing, like there's just more stuff happening and more things are automatic. They've kind of paired

Yast back a little bit. And that's, I think actually really, I should say, I think that's actually good on them. I think it's a good approach. Keep it lean and mean. Well, you're adapting too, right, to the ecosystem now. Like, as you say, there is just, there's somewhat more of a shared platform that you can tap into. So if you don't have to reinvent it yourself, don't.

I sort of feel like they may have adapted too far with the Samba configuration. Like, Wes, in the past, man, like you could set up so much stuff for Samba. You could even make the damn thing an actual directory controller or an NT4 domain controller all right there in Yast. Oh, just right from Yast. Whoa. Yeah. Dang. asked. Whoa. Yeah. Dang. Now it's like, now you go in there, you set your work group name

and you set if the services are enabled and if they start automatically. And that's it. That's all it does now. So everything else is in SambaConf and that's fine. That actually is probably maybe the best way to do it because you don't want people messing with this stuff unless I suppose they know what they're doing. But gosh,

I don't want to edit SambaConf. I don't want to. I like that both systems just default. I thought their hard drive layout config was smart, and I went with it, and I used ButterFS. And I had a much nicer and much smoother experience than my previous desktop experience it kind of braced me for. I was sort of braced to fight this thing.

And I had two servers set up and going in one evening, and then I just blew it away and did it again just to take a different approach at it. And I think a big part of it was getting that zipper cheat sheet. And there is a lot of good documentation out there now. And now I'm deploying applications via containers instead of a big old pile of RPMs and install shell scripts, which always was problematic for me on SUSE, and it's kind of just now a non-issue. So I actually found the experience better than I was expecting,

and I'm feeling a lot better about deploying it on our main server now. Yeah, I think this is going to work. I mean, if anything, we're going to screw it up, but I think it's going to work. JupyterGarage.com, the random swag bags are back. We have two different swag bags now. So what's in here is like stickers of the shows, retro items from past Jupiter Broadcasting swag,

you know, whatever, like events or sales or whatever. And then also we have some bonus stuff from the road trip that we're giving out on the meetups along the road trip and then there's a second journal for just five dollars more you get all that stuff but also you get the jupiter journal which is a really nice low-key journal it's a spiral bound so you can lay it open and flat with lined paper in there so you can just take notes and it's got a nice classy rocket on the front that's imprinted into it. It looks real good. And you see you can get the swag bag with that journal in there for just $5 more. Or you can go grab a journal if you just want the journal, and then you can choose your color.

We have them in blue or gray. And there is about a dozen of each bag left. So there's not a lot. And generally people put a lot of the orders in right after the first day or so after the or so after the show's out so if you're listening you want to grab one do grab it the jacket that's up there will be up for a while because that's print on demand and it is the bearded tux bomber and it's just something i wanted to do for the winter it's like your nice going to town jacket it's got another i'm really big now on just like the low-key subtle design it doesn't need to shout but you know can, if people know they know.

And so the bearded tux is one of my absolute favorite. That's all up at jupiter garage.com. And I should mention our members, our core contributors get a discount on that jacket. We got a little bit of feedback this week from our last episode on command line. Love chunky pie, who I love that name. He wrote in,

he says, I think the biggest draw to the GUI is the visual output. The drawback to the command line is the visual output as well that a non-power user sees. So he says, for non-super users, I don't believe the command line syntax, the input is the problem. A person can easily be taught and can understand the concept of command, name, option, and argument syntax. The problem lies in what they receive as the output when they type in a command and press enter. Try to explain the output and what all the columns of an ls-l command means to a regular user. He continues, I believe the solution to making the command line easier for non-super users is to change or have an option to change the output of the command line. If the output is something that visually is easier to understand, then the barrier for entry would be much lower for normal users. He also adds, PS Chris, I envy your RV as a home life. Keep living the dream.

Keep living the dream. First of all, very good points on the command output. So I think I do have some more thinking to do about my position, and I do appreciate that input. I also, though, have to acknowledge I find it so incredibly valuable that the commands I learned when I was just a wee lad nearly 30 years ago now, I find it awesome that I am still using some of those same commands or a slight tweak on those commands. And that the time I invested to learn that has paid dividends for 20 plus years.

And I can't think of any GUI experience where I can say the same. So I don't necessarily think the position's invalidated. I just think it needs some thinking. For the RV full-time thing, we do really love the freedom. But just to balance it all out, before I came into work today, I'm flying the drone up over the RV because there was 60 mile per hour winds blowing through the Pacific Northwest

yesterday. And we were under a tree. It's been trimmed, but the top of it is not. And it just started disintegrating and just fall. I mean, just it was just like disintegrating all over Lady Jupes because she was parked right underneath it. And I mean, bam, bam, smack, clump, thump. You know, you're just like you're hearing your solar panels take hits. And, you know, when we just got Lady Jupes, we had parked somewhere near.

Well, there's trees everywhere in the Pacific. There's nowhere that doesn't have trees. We parked near a tree and a branch actually came through our roof. Oh, no. Very early on. Yeah. So we have, you know. Literal scars.

Yeah. Really actual scars that are there still. We had to like seal it up, but the holes are still there. So I flew the drone up this morning to take a look at the damage. Not a single branch up there, a twig that got caught under one of the solar panels, not a crack in a single panel. It's like it all just rolled off. It just all rolled. I can't, maybe the rain and the wind pushed it all off. It blew it all off, but oh my God, I can't believe we survived that without branches up there. I thought I'd be, I thought honestly, I'd be going up to this weekend with a blower and, and some gloves and throwing branches off it. I thought I'd be, I thought honestly, I'd be going up there this weekend with a blower and some gloves

and throwing branches off it. But we did discover a crack in one of our seals. So my wife, Adia, as I'm down here recording, was up there fixing that. So it's not all freedom and road trips. There is work to be done.

Wes, I thought you could take this next one from Ryan that touches on the same topic of our command line love. Ryan writes in, I started typing gibberish at the command prompt almost 40 years ago. I enjoy it. I understand the appeal. And I really see the potential and I admire the elegance. But I have to agree with Linus Tech Tips that the command line

will not have a prominent place in the future of computing for regular people. I see friends and family type at a command prompt about as often as I see them pump the hood of their car and change their own oil. I know it's cliche, but sometimes I look to sci-fi for a glance at what could be. And when Geordi of Star Trek The Next Generation was adjusting the lighting in his quarters for a date,

he didn't sit down at a command prompt and type in how many lumens he wanted. And he didn't pull up an Elcar's GUI and adjust the lights with a dimmer switch. Because the Enterprise had the newest version of Home Assistant installed, he was able to say, computer, dim the lights. No, that's too low. Raise it a little more, a little more. Now play some relaxing music. Or in the episode where they were trying to find out what element was causing random ship malfunctions, the engineers didn't pull up a terminal and start typing SQL statements.

They asked the computer to access a list of possible elements, and they slowly eliminated them with more verbal commands. I think the future of computing will be something like that for ordinary people. But fear not, at least not on my account. I don't believe the command line is going away entirely any anytime soon. Can you think of any highly successful GUI apps that don't have a command line or at least an accessible API somewhere underneath them? I think there will probably always be some kind of backend with more options and flexibility offered in GUIs, accessible with a command prompt

of one form or another. It's a good take. It's got a good point. I mean, when he's throwing the Star Trek facts at me, I can't argue with that. I would wonder, perhaps the engineers at the Starbase that installed the computer, maybe they were using

the command line to get things going. And then the developers who programmed the interfaces for Geordi to command the luminance of the lights, perhaps they use the command line. And what I think

this probably gets back to is who is the new user for Linux? And in my estimation, the new user for Linux is one that's technical and one that is perhaps an engineer, a developer, a tinkerer, a hobbyist, an enthusiast. And of course you have users who have been set up with the system.

Companies and friends and family and schools, absolutely. But there's distributions that are purpose-built for that. But for the general tech community, people who would consider themselves pro-users, somebody who would consider themselves savvy in technology, I think it is not that it's too hard or it's too cryptic. I think it's truly a mindset thing.

I think it's a cultural mindset about how we view the command line. And again, now for new users or people like friends and family that don't have any interest in how the computer works, really for most people, they probably shouldn't have to use the command line. It should all be available to them some way. Well, it makes me think of, as you often touch on, you know, technology doesn't usually just go away. I mean, yeah, in some

cases, but we'll probably have all these things. We'll have standard GUIs, we'll have command lines, we'll have audio interfaces, perhaps some sort of

nonverbal interface in the future. I can watch you dance and interpret that somehow. I guess my fear is, like, I just hope we don't lose sight of

some of the design elements that go into the GUI side, you know, like touching on the car analogy there. Like some of the reasons some people who might want to change or do more maintenance on their car can't these days because it's not really designed with that in mind, right? It's made more difficult than it needs to be to service it. And for now in Linux, we don't have that. And I just don't want to see that disappear. Not that I think it necessarily will.

Great way to put it, Wes. That's exactly it is I don't change the oil in my car, but I would not want the ability for me to do it taken away. In fact, it's already kind of a pain in the ass. And like the funny thing is about the RV is the damn thing so big and it's more from like an industrial kind of legacy that it's actually easier for me. And I do change the oil on my RV because it's, Oh, wow.

It's more accessible to me and it's easier to understand it. It's not simple necessarily, but it is simple. It's, and I think that's actually an interesting more. I think about that is you're right. That is kind of what we're on the precipice of right now. And maybe why this has come up ultimately. I know that we have more to say in the mumble room. So what I'll do is I'll, I'll try to bring it up in the post show.

But we've got to clean up around here. Thank you to our core contributors over at unpluggedcore.com. Your direct support means that we don't have to load this show up with any random sponsor who's willing to sponsor us. I have the flexibility to just be flexible and make sure that I have the flexibility to be picky, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And I don't have to rush into anything. And that's really thanks to our member support. That's huge. And you know, it can only grow from there, right? Like one day, it could truly replace an entire sponsor. So thank you to everybody who supports us at unpluggedcore.com. You get a limited ad feed as a thank you and also the full live feed, which

today is worth the price of admission alone. In fact, maybe we should talk after the show. Maybe that should be released because I think that was a really valuable conversation we had in the pre-show. Huge, actually. So there's things that happen in the pre-show just organically because we have really interesting people showing up and sharing their perspectives in our Mumble room. So go over there. Check it out on PluggedCore.com. We also want to hear from you.

Contact the show, LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. And of course, our telegram is JupiterBroadcasting.com slash telegram. And if you're in the BC area, let Brent know. I mean, BC is a big place, but I have recently discovered that we have a few listeners in my immediate area. And so I'm in eastern BC near Cranbrook. And so I was thinking we might just do a little mini micro meetup,

maybe the beginning of December. So if anyone is in the area at all and interested, please get in touch, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, and we'll see what we can do. I might even have some gifts to give away. Oh, and just to be clear, if you are in B.C. and you don't show up, we will find you. Join or join the love plug. You know what?

If you do that, I'll let it slide. It happens every Sunday. You can get the mumble room details at Linux unplugged dot com slash mumble noon Pacific Jupiter broadcasting dot com slash calendar for the mumble lifetime mumble virtual love lifetime and for our show live stream. I have a really special pick, and it is a command line tool. Now, all the picks are not going to be command line tools, but it seemed appropriate for this week. And this one, if we have never covered this before, it is an egregious error that will be corrected.

Shame on us. It's called MP4 grep, a command line tool that searches audio and video files like grep. And so it's not just for MP4, even though it's called MP4 grep, it'll also search MP3 files, OGG files, WebM, MOV, WAV files. I'm going to try this after the show because I just found this a little bit ago. This could be awesome for like, what episode did we say this word or did we say this thing?

It sounds so great. How have we not known about this for years? This sounds amazing and kind of a little bit like wizardry. Do you have any idea how it's doing this? It's using something called VOSK, V-O-S-K. I'm feeling like I'm just discovering like this entire universe of stuff that exists. And, you know, VOSK is V-O-S-K. I'm feeling like I'm just discovering like this entire universe of stuff that exists.

And, you know, VOSK is a speech recognition toolkit. And so I kind of feel like it's Wes's fault because this is his area. We're always talking about this stuff. So he should have said something. I know. I don't know why we didn't see it. Probably because unlike many of our picks,

this is not written in Rust. No, this is a Java app, actually. You're right. You're right. That's got to be it. I will say this is super exciting. I kind of hack around this sometimes by, you know, if it's a video on YouTube or you can upload it to your own YouTube and get auto subtitles that way, you can then fetch the

SRTs and search. Because I use this a lot, or I would use this and will use this for just trying to figure out time codes or like, I know that was in a video, but this video doesn't really have chapters or something. Where did they talk about that? Where did they talk about that? Where did they talk about that? If I can do it with an open source tool, that is so much more flexible. And you know what's nice is Vosk, which I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation on because

it's the first time I've ever even seen the word. What's nice is that it's all offline. So you're not using like Google transcription or whatever. You know, you're just doing it. You're running it right there on your machine. It looks like it comes with a lightweight English model for that, you know, speech recognition. But Vosk has a whole bunch of other ones that you can go swap in if you are looking at some non-English sources.

So this looks so handy. Yeah, really. And it's a command line tool, too. So we got to give a little command line love for our command line picks out there. Although I have to say, I don't normally do this, but I wanted this to be a command line thing, but I found such an awesome GUI app that I'm going to tell you guys about next week. Ah, you tease.

I know, I know, I know. Go find our friends at Cloud Guru on social media. They're just slash the Cloud Guru pretty much any place that is a legit social media platform out there, you know, like the YouTubes or, I mean, I think that's social media, right? I think I consider that social media. Twitter's, the Facebook's, the Instagram's, you know, like the YouTubes or, I mean, I think that's social media, right? I think I consider that social media. Twitter's, the Facebook's, the Instagram's, you know, just slash a cloud guru for that

social media. And you can follow this year podcast at Linux Unplugged on Twitter, if that's your thing, and at Jupiter Signal. I don't know if anybody's doing that anymore, but if you want to and get information about what's going on, that's where you do it. But what you really ought to do, Chris's pro tip, invest in your RSS ecosystem, build your own system, and then go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com, find each one of our podcasts and subscribe. We have an all shows feed. Then you just get all the shows. You know,

then you get the full package, Linux action news, which has given you all the info you need. You're getting the breakdowns and a nice concise type package. You're getting the code of radio where we're doing more analysis on the entire tech industry with a developer bent. And then, of course, you're getting self-hosted, where Alex and I are talking about awesome free software projects that you can self-host all the time and the hardware that makes you do that, including I have a really cool device for that show next week. So why not get the all-show feeds? Then you get that. You get all the good stuff. And then you come over here live, and you've really got the complete package.

Join us next week. We do it live at JBLive.tv on a Tuesday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. 12 Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern,

jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Links to what we talked about today and things you can try out and our pick and the SUSE tips and all that at linuxunplugged.com slash 432. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. Remember those tuxes. Oh, man, I'm glad I remembered. Won't you remember? Tuxes.party. Go vote.

We got a big show coming up and we need your input. And perhaps you can fight against the lizard revolution. Anyways, really, thank you so much for joining us us and we'll see you right back here next tuesday Okay. Okay, jbtitles.com. Let's go do our boats. We got to go figure out a title for this thing. And then we got to ship it off. Park Rider, though, I know you had something you wanted to jump in on during the show. Oh, yeah.

I was going to say that going back to how the command line should be more friendly to newer Linux users, the command line, we might want it to maybe make it more human speakable. So instead of commands like sudo apt-get update or whatever, have commands like just update so that it would, you know, we say when we tell people to go into the command line, it's just easier to say, yeah, just go in there, type update, it'll update your system. Right. Or like something along the lines of saying admin override update or something. Basically, if you want to still have the sudo type elevation request, prefix it with words people can say. Exactly. Sudo is super user do. So admin override or something along those lines that somebody can understand. Just effing do what I say, machine.