LINUX Unplugged - 446: Kudu Cores and Cloud Wars

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

We put the sports car of Linux laptops to the test. Is it the multi-tasking machine it claims to be? And an essential update on the show.

Well, if you bet that the Linux copter would make it more than a year, you might be able to cash in. It looks like the pioneering little chopter has made the one year mark on Mars, which I can't believe. I don't know, Wes, I would have guessed six months. It's been six months. I think after it did so well, I thought it would just keep going. But from the start, I was pretty nervous.

You know, until these are proved out, anything can happen on Mars. I'm also still bracing myself every time I see one of these articles. I'm like bracing myself for, well, it did so good and exceeded our expectations, but it's definitely starting to fade now.

There's too much dust on the solar panels, right? Because it's not like they can go out there and brush those things off. But there's a quote here that says we're, quote, still going very strong.

And that was from the deputy operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So they would know. More exciting science to come. It's probably because it runs Linux, right? It's got to be. 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. Thanks for your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello gentlemen. Thanks for joining me today. Hello. You know, last week we had fun talking about low-end $15 Linux boxes. Well, this week we're going to the other extreme and we're reviewing a new Ryzen-powered kudu from System76.

I gave this thing the full ML special. No, not machine learning. the Michael Larble special. No, actually, it was machine learning benchmarks from the Phronix test suite. But I also just punished the heck out of it with my Steam library because, yeah, it's got an RTX 3060 in it. I don't think I've used a graphics card that new since the pandemic began, so I was excited. So after we talk about what I did with this thing and who I think this laptop is going to be good for, we'll round it all out with some great emails, some great emails, a whole rash of pics.

It's a rash, Wes, and more. So you're going to want to stick around for all of that. I mean, I would. But before we go any further, we got to say hello to our virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Good to have you all in there today on a sunday on a sunday come on and join us sometime if you're listening to this you want to join us on sunday jblive.tv we usually get the stream going around

noon 30 sometimes noon it'll just kind of be like the standby screen but you know you can get there get yourself set up get your chair ready walk your be like the standby screen, but you know, you can get there, get yourself set up, get your chair ready, walk your dogs. Wes is always good about that. You know, before he does something for a while, he goes and walks the dogs. I mean,

yeah, you got to that way. You don't get any annoying interruptions while you're trying to enjoy yourself. There is that, there is those that there's that advantage, I suppose. So before we get to the kudo kudu,

we'll try not to do that the whole episode. I wanted to talk about our thoughts on linode and the acquisition with akamai because this has probably been the number one thing that's come in via like telegram and twitter and so i wanted to take a few days and think about it uh because like you know it's hard to really say anything at this point because the deal is still so new but i know that all of us we've watched or even been through good or bad transitions. So I know some of us are like, oh, it's going to happen. I've seen that.

I felt like that vibe, you know, and it's totally understandable. But the truth is, you know, we don't know yet. We're going to watch and see. But we do know that Linode has a pretty good history with transitions, tough transitions. I mean, I've watched them deal with a lot of that. And I think the other thing that gives me some comfort, for sure, is that Akamai doesn't have a compute VPS solution. There's not like duplicate work being done there.

They're not just going to roll Linode into their existing thing. Yeah, it seems like they're adding Linode as a way to give their large customers good, fast compute resources that complements their worldwide CDN. That's probably a best-case scenario, because you figure these folks at Linode have been hard at this for 19 years, right? And so

where do you go in a world where AWS, Google, and Microsoft are sucking all of the air out of the room, right? Like, what do you do here? And if Linode was, let's say, acquired by AWS, for example, that'd be a lot of duplication of effort. I would be pretty concerned about the future of Linode.

And, you know, I look out there at the market and there's not anywhere I really want to move our systems to. We have over a dozen boxes in production on Linode. And I don't really want to move anywhere else. Linode has like the sweet spot there. And this isn't part of the, yeah, this is just how I feel about it. And I'm looking at it from like,

not as like, oh, JB's kind of concerned about future sponsor revenue and how we're going to be sustainable as a business. Like, putting that aside, I'm looking at it from a customer who uses this for my business. And I'm really glad they didn't get bought by something like a Microsoft. Yeah, really? Jeez. It'd just be, you know, it just sort of, the product would fade away.

Guess we're using Azure now. Yeah, yeah. You know, you think about it, too. I hope this works out for the best simply because I don't really see, like, another Linode starting at this point. They started at a special time. And now with AWS and the other big cloud providers,

it doesn't seem like anybody's going to... How are you going to catch up? Yeah. Which VCs are you going to trick into, you know, funding you to compete against these monsters at this point? So I feel like as far as like, you know, you can go get a Linux box that you can SSH into and it's a full OS that you have access to.

Do whatever you want on. That's a bit of a dying breed. And so there's a lot at stake here, but I can't see like quitting Linode in protest over this because a, the product is still the same product, right? The product hasn't changed. Right. If that's, yeah, if that doesn't change then and if a bunch of us took our business away in protest that would only kind of accelerate a future we don't want to have happen so like i'm not going

to quit over i'm not going to stop being a customer over this and i'm not going to stop having them sponsor our shows over this because it hasn't changed the last 19 years. It's a new era. It means it's a new era. And we don't really know where things are going to go. And it's these waves in the industry that the show has rid since the very beginning. I mean, the whole network has sort of observed these trends and rode these waves. I feel like all these changes are happening in the backdrop of the podcast advertising market getting rougher. Because the reality is Spotify and YouTube are sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room. They're just so dominant now.

There's another key piece to it, too. It's not just their network effect. They give the advertiser a single point to sell. They go to a dashboard. They pick the demographic. They pick to a dashboard, they pick the demographic, they pick all of the options about runtime. There's no email chains and back and forth with individual creators. No negotiating. Right. It's all just automated. That's why Facebook ads do so well too. It's like taking the Facebook ad model and applying it to podcasts, including the monitoring, right? And so Linode is like super pivotal in helping keep podcasting decentralized and independent.

I also feel like ultimately podcasting can't hitch its wagon to whatever is the big wave in the industry right now because these waves fade over time and they transition. That's just what happens, right? That's this industry. That's a novel we want to have happen to the shows. So, you know, I'll tell you, this is a little bit of confession time. I don't think I've ever said this on air. But this whole sponsor race, always trying to get the next sale,

that's the stress of that, is ultimately the number one factor that led me to sell JB back in 2018. Because a sponsor relationship can take anywhere from two months if you're extremely lucky, that's probably the shortest deal I've ever experienced, to about a year. If anybody's ever worked with sales or worked with a salesperson, you know what I'm talking about. It takes a ton of investment and time. It takes reaching out every single day. It takes being willing to be told no 20 times for every yes. And it means sometimes you're constantly worried about how you're going to balance all of this. And then, of course, there's the meta pressure of making sure that you serve the audience first.

The content isn't impacted. There's so much stress behind it that it was ultimately the number one factor in why I sold because it was impacting my health. And that's why when we talk about things like the value for value payment systems or the Jupiter dot party membership, I can't see, and maybe I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see a future 10 years down the road when I turn 50, where I'm still doing this unless it's audience funded. I just can't really see that sustainably working out because I'll probably die before then, to be honest with you. What has become really kind of clear to me in the second year is a lot

of the pressure and stresses that led me to sell. I can feel them building again. I'm already experiencing health side effects that I don't really feel like talking about on air. And it's a very dynamic marketplace. The tech industry, specifically the very technical aspect of it, is extremely fluid. I would not have been able to do this if Linode wasn't such a great business partner to work with. They made it okay to do sponsorships again for me. with. They made it okay to do sponsorships again for me. They were the first to answer my email. When I jumped on a video call with them, they had JB Swag on the desk. And it has been a great relationship since day one. Since, you know, I knew I was going independent, but I couldn't say anything public. Since that moment forward, they were just right there supporting us. And so, you know, I'm not going anywhere with them.

And as far as I'm concerned, these guys have earned a payout after 19 years of hard work, guys and gals, of course. But we don't know what the future will hold. They don't know what the future will hold, right? Wes and I have been through acquisitions, and we know how it goes. You just, the staff aren't aware and things are fluid, they're dynamic, but you know, nobody's going to also throw away a valuable business. They didn't spend nearly a billion dollars on Linode

to just throw out what it does. That's not how you'd make good on an investment. So I am of the opinion that when it comes to working with potential possible sponsors, we couldn't have found better alignment with Linode because we do use them, right? Yeah, absolutely. And they're clearly providing a valuable service for our audience. And that $100 credit is legit. That's like real money that you can use on their platform for a while, right? And I don't like AWS. I don't like Azure.

It's way too expensive. it's way too complicated the dashboards are like their own proprietary land now and i don't want to have to interface with any of that i want a linux box you know and maybe i'll orchestrate it you know centrally manage it maybe i'll use containers maybe i'll just use as a traditional linux box and i'll gas maybe i'll install something from the repo. You know, like I want that kind of flexibility. And there's only a few businesses now that offer that. And so I still think Linode is the best of them, regardless of this, but we'll see, you know, and, uh,

and that's just it, right? Like we won't, we won't know. It's a long kind of timeframe. We have friends there and so far, none of them are panicking. So, you know, that's usually a pretty good sign. Uh, but, uh, yeah yeah, it's a stressful thing. And managing sales while you're also running four or five shows and running a business. And I'm not trying to complain here.

I love what I do. I don't mean to come across like I'm complaining. I'm just saying. It's frustrating to you when you're having to spend so much time focusing on the sponsorship. Not that you don't value those relationships, but it's just, it's a secondary thing to, to making really good shows. And I just don't know if I'd ever have a relationship like I've had with Linode again. Maybe it's possible,

you know? So I hope he just continues. I hope they want to keep working with us forever. We'll see. We just don't know at this point, but they're still, you know, they,

they've still got ads on here and we're still happy to run them for as long as they want to. So that's sort of it. And you know what? I've chatted with them briefly about this because really, what can they say? Right. But we've chatted and, you know, business continues as usual for now. That's the word. And I hope that maybe even this inspires somebody else to invest in this area. We'll see. We'll see. And, you know, Akamai kind of makes a lot of sense. I couldn't really, if you're going to ask me, who else really could make this acquisition, I can think of a lot of bad names.

They've been around much like Linode for a long time. That's sort of an independent actor in the space. All respect to the folks that work at Cloudflare, but I'm kind of glad it wasn't Cloudflare. In conclusion, if you find value out of these shows, I would love your support. Jupiter.party, so you can support all of the shows, or you could become a core contributor

at unpluggedcore.com and support just this show directly. Because, you know, when I get to a certain age, there may be a point, and I'm not saying this jokingly, but there may be a point where maybe the only shows I still do are the shows that have enough member support. Because, you know, at some point, my health will have to come first. And this isn't an ultimatum. I'm not meaning to make it sound weird like this. It's just, this is what's been on my mind in the news. This is what I've been processing. And I want to be transparent with everybody because if there's ever a shift that happens, I want everyone to know what my thought process is. I don't want to surprise anybody. A lot of you have been listening

for a really long time following this journey. And I just want to be straight with you right now. Everything's fine, but you know, there could be a day where I decide we need to scale back a little bit for health reasons. And it's going to be the shows that have members support that stay on the air. I would love one day to just do these shows until the day I die and have it be member supported because I have been doing this for 15 years, and have it be member supported. Because I have been doing this for 15 years. About 13 of those years, maybe 12 of those years, have been primarily sponsor funded.

And I figure I can do that. I'm a pretty good salesman, I feel. And I have a pretty good success rate once I actually get into a conversation with somebody. So I feel like I could keep doing it for a while, but the tricky thing is, when I'm selling ads for Linux Unplugged, I'm typically not selling an ad for self-hosted or Coda Radio. one show is energy not spent on another show. And you could see how when you have four or five things you're buying, you're selling ads against how that really multiplies in time and stress and anxiety, especially when it's just one person doing it. So my thoughts on this really are, if you're in a position where you can support us through a membership program,

or you want to participate in the value for value system with one of the new podcast apps at newpodcastapps.com, please do. Because long-term, that's probably what's going to make it all viable. And long-term, I'd rather the network spend its energy on super serving the show content to super serve the audience and taking the energy that we have and putting it 100% into the content. The only way to do that is with membership programs. Now, that all said, we've made it work for a while. I think we can keep making it work for a while. But I just wanted to be straight with everybody where we're at on that. And we will get to some of the boost messages that have been sent in using the new podcast apps.

This is my new favorite thing, but we'll talk about it in the feedback. Because now, now, it is time to talk about this laptop. Yeah, we got some work to do. So we have the new podcast apps. This is my new favorite thing, but we'll talk about it in the feedback. Because now, now, it is time to talk about this laptop. Yeah, we got some work to do. So we have the new Kudo. I think this is like the sixth generation from System76. This thing is a multitasking Linux beast.

It has an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU. It turbos up to 4.6 gigahertz take that in for a second it turbos up to 4.6 gigahertz eight cores 16 threads that also is packed with an nvidia rtx 3060 gpu it has an integrated gpu as well which is an rx vega 8 class gpu which is an RX Vega 8 class GPU, which is still actually surprisingly great. Right, that's no slouch. You could really just get by on the integrated graphics for most jobs until you need to do something that really pushes that GPU. It has a 1920 by 1080 FHD matte display.

So it's a 1080p display. However, it's very vibrant and it runs at 144 hertz. It does seem pretty darn smooth. Yeah, it really adds to that. That is the thing about it. It's got two M.2 SSD slots in it. So you could put two disks. Mine's configured with 500 gigs, a single M.2 with 500 gigs. It's got kind of a weird smattering of connectivity. I thought this was really odd. I just don't get the USB ports on this. So it has one USB-C Gen 2,

but it doesn't support power delivery over that. Doesn't support Thunderbolt, because again, this is an AMD system. Most of them don't. I like none of them really. But it does support DisplayPort out that. So you got a USB-C port that can do DisplayPort. You've also got HDMI out, and you've got a mini DisplayPort out of that. So you've got a USB-C port that can do DisplayPort. You've also got HDMI out.

And you've got a mini DisplayPort. And you've got the internal screen. Wow. So you can pretty easily run four screens off this sucker. But continuing on with the USB, it's got one Gen 2 Type-A, one Gen 1 Type-A, and one 2.0 Type-A. So it's got three different types of Type-A and one 2.0 Type-A.

So it's got three different types of Type-A USB ports. Oh, okay. Maybe that's good if you've got some sort of very fiddly USB device? I guess. But man, like,

wouldn't it just be nice if they were all just one generation and it was the latest generation? I don't, that feels like something most users might not understand. And you put it at a disk. That could be very confusing, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But what are you going to do? I don't think they necessarily have control over the board layout and that kind of stuff. It has a whopper of a power supply with a barrel connector. It's a 230-watt power supply. Because, I mean, again, this thing is taking some serious power when it needs it. Rocking a 5.5-millimeter barrel connector on that thing. It's got a 48 watt hour battery,

about 49 watt hours, really four cell lithium ion battery. So this is not a lot of battery life, especially when you turn on the RTX. It actually did better than I expected. I got like a solid three hours. Okay. I did not expect that.

That's, I mean, that's, yeah, that's long enough to hang out in a coffee shop for a while or something. And definitely long enough to get something done if you forgot your power adapter. That too. But not long enough to go all day.

Nowhere near the MacBook Pro level. But I did benchmark this against a MacBook Pro. Now, granted, not a lot of the machine learning stuff is actually full available on the Mac. And from what I can kind of tell, it doesn't seem like what is available is necessarily M1 optimized. So keep that in mind. But I did do a little Foronix benchmark comparison against this Kudo and a MacBook Pro Max. Okay.

Totally loaded out MacBook Pro Max and fresh boot on both. Still running Pop! OS on this guy. Latest version, I assume, of Mac OS on the Mac. I don't know if I, but I'm pretty sure it's the latest. You not updating? I don't see it. I have to say, the Kudo kicked the butt of the MacBook Pro in just about every category where the MacBook Pro could run a viable comparison with just a few exceptions.

There were actually a couple exceptions where the MacBook Pro pulled ahead. Okay. I bet those are probably M1 optimized benchmarks. I didn't dig further than that. But for the most part, almost universally, the Kudo just kicked butt, especially in the RTX version, accelerated versions of the benchmarks, because I compared it with the AMD GPU and with the video.

The built-in compared to, oh. Yeah, and when you turn on the RTX graphics, it just takes things up to a level that the MacBook can't touch. So there is definitely more performance to be had there, at least in these Pharonix benchmarks. If you're doing something that really takes advantage of a GPU. Yeah, and he's downloading real tools like TensorFlow

and running them against the system. So they're legit tools. They're not just like synthetic benchmarks. The trade-off obviously is the Kudo's making more noise. Yeah, I've got it going here right in front of me. You may be able to hear. Maybe. Is that what we're hearing?

Are we hearing that right now? I think so. Oh, you're right. What are you doing that's making it go? I thought I heard that breaking through your gate. I just, I had opened Steam a while ago. Maybe that. Oh, it's probably downloading, right?

Oh, probably. Yeah. While we're streaming with us geez well i had to put the thing to the test so it definitely has fan noise that the macbook does not you can hear you can kind of hear it right now here why don't you point your microphone down at it or pick it up yeah and now you've picked it up and pointed it at the mic so of course that's but it can kick up it's i i think they've they've managed the fan curve here i don't actually know this for sure but it seems to me it goes quite a while before it kicks in and then once it kicks in it stays

spun up for a bit and then very slowly ramps back down i suppose that's the safe way to do it you know when you're putting that kind of horsepower in there i don't know how you're gonna get away from it and it's blowing out both sides as well. That's already dripping down a little bit, though. Okay, that's not bad. Yeah, it is coming down now. You can tell. And I don't know how you're going to have an RTX graphics card in there and not have fans.

It's 230 watts of power this thing's taking. That's another reason why it's not doing USB-C power delivery, right? Now, you do have some options, right, with POP for switching between what graphics card you're actually using? Yeah, take a look at that. So if you go in the system menu there in GNOME and you go to the power,

like where the battery is at. Oh, yeah, power's there. Yeah, you've got integrated graphics, hybrid graphics. You can do the discrete NVIDIA graphics only. And then they have compute mode. Do you see that? Compute graphics.

Disables external displays. Right, so it's supposedly just even more performance for the internal GPU. So if you've got some sort of job you're going to do. Well, you don't, yeah, you're not actually using any of the ports. Right. Wow. Right. I like that they give you that option because by default, I'm going to want those ports. And this thing, really, if you're buying this, you're somebody who's running four or five pretty performance intensive apps simultaneously because you could load this thing with multiple m.2s this thing can take up to 64 gigabytes of ram uh i mean you know like you could really push

this thing and it really doesn't flinch at all it's got so much bandwidth it's working with it reminds me of a high performance car that is maybe you know kind of has like a tight suspension so it's a little bit of a bumpy ride sometimes, but this thing corners like a bastard and goes like zero to 60 in like three or four seconds. And it even kind of has a bit of a car look to it. If you look at it, the hood is a brushed metal look. It's got a discreet set of LED lights that kind of almost look like a scoop and a hood, but they're done in a tasteful way.

I'd say it's less distracting than a glowing Apple logo. And then the keyboard area has kind of a brushed metal look. It's a plastic that's pretty comfortable to put your arms on, but it has kind of like an almost an automotive look to it. It kind of reminds me of a car like that. It kind of has an aesthetic to it like that. And something about the back vents remind me of like the hood of a car you know yeah well it's kind of got the same same style of design a few elegant lines and curves

now you'll notice if you hold that under your microphone right now pick it up do you hear that buzz i do yeah that's one downside that as a podcaster yeah i don't know that's just some machines do that even even some wireless keyboards do that, where if you put them under a microphone, you get a buzz like that. That's just something we have to deal with. This one does create that issue. The audio in and out are good and clean. They sound just fine. But it does seem to buzz when it's near a microphone. So that's one thing that I noticed.

I was sitting there using it underneath my mic the other day, and it was buzzing like that. Fairly niche use case right there. It's fairly niche. That's one of our problems. One thing that I noticed, I was sitting there using it underneath my mic the other day, and it was buzzing like that. You know. But that's a fairly niche use case right there. Yeah, it's fairly niche. That's one of our problems, both. I can't podcast and play Steam games at the same time. So I did throw a bunch of Steam games at this, and I think it goes without saying, it just crushes everything.

I literally played every single game, including Cyberpunk 2044 or whatever it is, 20-whatever. I played that at max ultra-graphic settings. I literally played every single game, including Cyberpunk 2044 or whatever it is, 20 whatever. I played that at max ultra graphic settings, everything at max freaking graphics. Because I'm like, you know what? The deck's coming. Let's see what the state of Linux gaming is. And basically, if it works on Linux at this point, it worked on the Kudu and at max settings. And I have not got to experience that treat in a couple of years.

experience that treat in a couple of years. And if you were looking for gaming, I mean, yeah, 4K might be nice, but Linux does so good at 1080p. We've really got that nailed, though. It does, dude. And the graphics with that RTX at 1080p, you can run everything at

max and just love it. Just super smooth. Alright, I got a question for you guys. How's the keyboard on this thing? Great question. Great question. What do you think, Wes? I put it somewhere in the middle, personally. Yeah, it's definitely not the worst laptop keyboard I've used by a mile.

You know, it's backlit. I appreciate that. That is legitimately handy. It's got, I'd say, yeah, maybe middle. It's pretty decent key travel. It's kind of got a light feeling. And then the positioning of the trackpad relative to the keyboard is throwing me off at the moment. That's the first, literally the first comment I get from anyone I've shown it to. Is that the trackpad's off center.

The trackpad is actually centered with the QWERTY part of the keyboard, but this laptop has a 10 key. And so it's not centered with the entirety of the laptop keyboard, but it is centered with the QWERTY part of the keyboard. You get what I'm saying? It's like, I get it because when you're typing, where is your thumb? Your thumb is where the trackpad's at. But it looks weird. It's not, it's just not symmetrical.

The solution, honestly, is just a giant trackpad. That is really, it should just be a huge ass trackpad and then problem solved I think I would worry now I haven't really tested this so it's doing a pretty

good job here but I think I would worry that while I was typing I'd be constantly bumping the trackpad and making my mouse jump around if I'm thinking like

I'm on like a train to work or a bus with tight quarters kind of thing I can see that okay guys that being said how is the trackpad?

I know that's been an issue in Linux for a little while. I think we're getting better at that. But how's this one performing for you? You know, the fact that I didn't even notice a single problem is probably all of the commentary you probably need from it. I actually, huh, I had very little, I had no complaints about the trackpad at all. It just worked. I'd love it to be bigger.

But the buttons are a little loud. Yeah, yeah. And I'd love to have buttons at the top of the trackpad. I'd love to have buttons at the top. But the Surface itself, it feels quite nice. It's smooth. By default here, the integration with Pop, I think the cursor speed and the trackpad,

like the combo of total speed to get across the screen, but still having fine control is pretty dialed in. Yeah, this is probably nicer than any desktop computer i have by a pretty good percentage and it's in a laptop form factor and for somebody who lives in a small space i'm never probably ever gonna buy a desktop for home just never gonna do where would you put it? Right. But I absolutely loved being able to play my games again. You know, like just having access to all those games, it honestly made me super stoked for the deck. Just having access to my games and making them look good again and stuff like, whew, this is a really nice machine. And if it wasn't for the buzzing under the mic, I'd

probably be really tempted to have one for the RV. I have to be honest, because the multiple display support is pretty great. It really does have quite a few ports, even if it's a somewhat odd set. And it's got Wi-Fi 6, which is nice because I can't really run Ethernet in the RV. So having good Wi-Fi is huge for me. And the other thing I have to note, because I think this stuff really kind of matters is it's really at least in my personal CRIS score it's getting high marks for repairability and upgradability

this is something I want to look at more is like what are the DIY options for these machines and I have to say they nail this they have a technical document which I'll link in the show notes that gives you a brilliant under the hood look at this thing. And they have specifically labeled and identified every major component you might want to replace or upgrade. The RAM is immediately accessible. The two M.2

slots are instantly accessible, but they kind of went above and beyond that too. They even labeled like the fan connectors, the fan connectors, the LCD connectors, how the keyboard is wired to the, where the keyboard connector is wired to the main board, where the Wi-Fi card's at, the speaker connectors, the CMOS battery. Like, they've gone through and labeled everything

in highlights and then have a map that shows you what that stuff is that you can repair. This is really nice. Yeah. I think every, this is a standard that every manufacturer should be held to. Yeah, definitely.

You could sit here and say, yeah, okay, it's kind of big. It's a big laptop. Although compared to my Bonobos and Oryxes, this is not big, right? You're talking to a guy who's had multiple

Bonobo workstation laptops that were probably twice the thickness of this thing, right? At least, maybe even more. And it's really not that heavy even for, you know, if it's a little thicker here, but it's, yeah. I cannot, they say it's four pounds, like 4.8 or something.

I don't know about that. If it is, it's very well distributed. It is, does not feel heavy. And the fact that you can pop that bottom off and get access to replace the fans to, I don't know, maybe in eight years, maybe 10 years down the road, you want to put a little more heat transfer treatment on your CPU,

you're going to be able to figure out how to do that. And they make all that information documented. And I don't know, I feel like everybody should have to do that. And if it means that it's a little bit thicker to have a removable bottom, that seems like a pretty good trade-off. Because if I'm buying this kind of machine, I'm not looking for like the half pounder that I throw in my laptop for my, you know. That's a different system. Yeah. This isn't my coffee shop machine. This is my multitasking heavy workload machine. That's why I bought Bonobos. In the past, I bought them

because I would go to my clients and I would run five or six virtual machines. I would like do test migrations in VMs on my laptop and then give them the results. And I would just, you know, I had a data machine with a lot of horsepower to do that. Yeah. So I was fine that it only had a, you know, two hour battery because I just needed to set it up at a desk and plug it in. You would have an outlet there. So, you know, a lot of us still have those kinds of workloads and I think it nails that so well. I'm so impressed. Like I, I'm really sad that I have to send it back. That's just a

review unit because it's been really fun to have a machine that games as good as my son's laptop. And it's, it's a nice, it's a nice compromise. It does get loud, but for the horsepower, I mean, it's pretty understandable. Okay. I have one last question for you, and it's a bit of a long-form one. We were lucky enough to get a really wonderful tour of System76 over the summer. And ever since that, I've had a hesitation with System76's laptops, and I wonder if you guys share this sentiment. of the quality and the care and attention that we saw them putting into, you know, the launch keyboard and everything they manufacture in-house, I've had this hesitation about buying a System76 laptop because they're not quite making those in-house yet. I think maybe I feel like they might be headed that way, but how do you each kind of bridge the gap between what we saw over the summer and the amazing quality and thoughtful engineering that went into everything they make in-house versus these laptops?

I think you're definitely right to point out that it's not quite the same because, yeah, they're creating these things from whole cloth for the most part, which is very impressive. which is very impressive. But I think the nature of what you're talking about, that same intention, those same skill sets, they're applied to the base that they work with for their laptops. I think that's like the fan curves, some of the nice integrations with Pop! OS itself, a lot of these firmware efforts that have been going on,

those are things that just not that many other folks are doing. So yeah, you do need to look at the hardware, look at the aesthetics of the hardware, look at those things they can't change right now, but they add some nice stuff on top. There's still like the net benefit of them doing something for so long. Like they bring that, all that experience to every machine they make. Like I spent my own money, full price, on a pretty loaded out ThinkPad X1. And I haven't been super thrilled with it. And you notice we haven't seen any updates. There's been a few releases of Fedora.

There's been a few Intel chipset updates that have come out. And there's been nothing from Lenovo on a new Fedora ThinkPad. I don't know what that's about. But I wonder if maybe it wasn't a huge success or maybe that's just not something they're super focused on. But that experience that System76 brings to the product is noticeable. I definitely have noticed over the years their ideas working their way into these machines that they don't necessarily manufacture themselves. I would prefer them to build it in-house.

And when they get there, I'm probably going to be one of the first people in line to pick one of those machines up. But Linux users have always had a limited set of truly Linux-first native hardware to pick from. And System76 has always kind of been there offering something. Yeah, and you just don't have to worry about that, right? I mean, you can install, you know, it's going to support whatever Linux workload

you really want to throw at it. Casey, in, in the member room, you've got some thoughts on this? Yeah, I purchased a System76 laptop about a year ago now, the Lemur Pro when it first came out. And I agree that it's clearly not a device that they made themselves. But at the same time, when you're checking out, it has that one-year warranty that comes with it. And the quality that they put into their post-sale care is just as good as the quality that they put into the devices they make themselves. They take great care of you when things go wrong. And they do it in a way that is much more upfront and honest than a lot of companies that I've had to do laptop warranty repairs with. Right. At the end of the day, even if maybe you like some you like some aspects of a, say, Dell machine a little more, who do you want to be on the phone with?

Yeah, we know the support team, and we definitely have seen them working. You know, this is obviously, we're friends with them. They have sponsored Coder. They don't sponsor this show. I don't know if they've ever sponsored Linux Unplugged. But we're friends with them because they make something good, and so we were drawn to them.

I mean, it's a bunch of nerds making some needs. Yeah, right? And we just, you know, being fancy podcasters, I guess, get to be lucky enough to get to meet these people sometimes. It's going to be interesting to watch them when they do get the opportunity to build their own laptops. I would imagine that's got to be the hardest

thing they're ever going to try to do. They were smart to start with the keyboard. You get that, right? That does a lot. Well, and they clearly have a high bar for what they make. You can't put it into words. It's not like they're not making the job of implementing this for themselves any easier

just in that regard. I think it would be so great if they could bring customers through their factory on the regular because there's people who have seen System76 Factory and there's people who haven't. And it's a ridiculous, obsessive amount of attention to detail they put into this stuff.

And you can only really wrap your head around how much goes into a business like this unless you go there. Humans are so bad at this. We do this. I'm sure people do this about JB. You think you understand how a business can work, so you think you can conceptualize it. And then you get in that industry and you realize it is infinitely more complex. It is an entire world. A thousand more things that you had no idea about and debates and tradeoffs.

Totally, totally. So that is them to a T right there. I realized when I toured that factory, which I've done a few times now, every time I'm like, holy shit. I had no idea they were even worrying about this or thinking about this or solving this. Or a whole problem that requires a machine or a custom setup to handle, even if it's a small little thing at the end. Leno.com slash unplugged. Go there to support this here show and get yourself $100 in 60 credit on a new account.

And you go there to support the show. Oh, I almost got a little prospector in there. He's in the back. Brent mentioned him in the pre-show. So now the prospector is like. I'm ready for him. Coming down from the hills. Oh, he was almost there for a moment.

But then I said something and he snuck away. Anyways, but real, you know, actual Chris will tell you it's just the best place to host something. Like I've looked at the options and Linode's got the perfect mix. They have a bonkers crazy fast bandwidth. They have 11 data

centers you can choose from. Their pricing is, you know, 30 to 50% less than the hyperscalers that want to lock you into their complex platforms that just

want to just essentially create their own version of the internet. You don't have to deal with any of that with Linode, none of that stuff. And they've invested in their infrastructure year after year after year. They've been really clever. Like they just did a round of AMD EPYC processor upgrades not too long ago.

And then they just got done doing a round of NVMe PCI storage upgrades not too long ago. And they're working on a new product that they haven't even announced yet. And there's always stuff going on in the background. They're always taking stuff to the next level. And the thing that's really cool about them that I've really appreciated is they are Linux geeks. So they've looked at the way the industry does stuff and they'll often go, OK, that's great. How do we do that with Linux instead? Which now is just like you can do everything with Linux. But that wasn't always the case.

That wasn't always the case. And, you know, they spent 19 years figuring this stuff out and building the best platform to host your stuff. Anything that is user facing, man, I just wouldn't have it anywhere else but Linode. You know, it's like when you're running a business, you don't want to have to worry about this stuff. You don't want to have to worry about it

and you want it to be reliable. You don't want complaints. I sleep easy this stuff. You don't want to have to worry about it. And you want it to be reliable. You don't want complaints. I sleep easy at night having our infrastructure on Linode. So go get $100, try it out, and support the show. It's linode.com slash unplugged. All right, well, I already did my plugs, really. Unpluggedcore.com if you want to become a member. You get two options.

You get the full live uncut, like when I screw up and hit the wrong button, or Wes goes into one of his cussing rants. Happens sometimes. Happens. All that gets left in the show. Plus you get the pre and post show, which you think you get the pre and post show. Oh no.

Oh no. There's so much more show. And you're responsible of it. Or maybe, maybe you don't want to spend like two hours listening to a Linux podcast. We also make a shorter version. It's still got all the fine touches from our editor, Joe. So it sounds great, but it's ad free.

So it's shorter. It's a little tighter. And it's like a special like Joe signature edition. That's what we should call it. That's what we should call it. Because it's great. You know, it's all the same production, but we just have the ads. Yeah, he cuts all of our crap out. Yeah.

It's not crap. Wait, I mean... We presume our members are so dedicated to the show, they already have enjoyed our sponsor's offer, and so now they listen to the member feed. Oh, I meant our ramblings, not the sponsor. Oh, yeah, your cussing rants. Yeah, for sure. Definitely get... Well, actually, that's my favorite part.

That's my favorite part. We'll have to have its own dedicated feed someday. Definitely. We also love your feedback. We didn't get a lot this week. We got a lot of boosts. We'll cover those. But Brent went through and he said,

Chris, this is the biggest pile of shit I've ever seen. That's what he said. It takes a lot to rile them up. He didn't really say that. I wouldn't. But we'd love to get your feedback at Linuxuxunplugged.com slash contact. Thoughts on what we've said, ideas for the show, prodogies to check it out.

Put it all in there. And join our Matrix community. It's growing every single day. We've got dedicated feedback rooms for each show. We've got discussion topic rooms for individual topics. There's even a Bitcoin room because Brent insisted all of that. You can get information at linuxunplugged.com slash matrix. And last but not least, the last thing I have to say, it's because this is going on way too long and I'm just making it worse right now. So it's like getting really bad now. The last thing I'll say is linuxunplugged.com

slash mumble. You know, we got a mumble room. I don't need to repeat it again. Join it for God's sakes. You know, I told you both that we didn't get much feedback this week, but actually we got a ton of great feedback. This just long form ideas that people have been working on, which have been really great. Okay, good. But it takes, you know, so why were you swearing so much? It just seemed like completely inappropriate in retrospect. More that I only have certain, you know, only so much brain capacity for all the great things that everyone's sharing with us. True. It was early, too. And some of them can only be put into the show at the right time. So we do have a few, and we'll get to the boosts in a sec.

But Joshua did share some cool things he's working on with his Pi, since that was our topic. He says, I like playing with circuits and I have used Arduinos a lot. Recently, I acquired the new Pi Zero 2W and decided to use the GPIO on it instead of an Arduino. The workflow was so much nicer. First, I could program in Python instead of C++. And he says here, I think I could even do Rust. Second, I can connect the Pi to Wi-Fi, code remotely, and upload to the Pi without having to power it down, connect to my computer, and reflash it. I can also just SSH in and pull up a Python interpreter to experiment live. I even could imagine a setup where I hook up VS Code to seamlessly code on the Pi from my computer.

I'm not even sure I'm going to go back to Arduinos, he says. Yeah, that's, those are all great ideas. Now, there may be some times, you know, whether you just need something smaller or for power reasons or for the particulars of connecting to hardware that an Arduino makes more sense. But yeah, I mean, Pis are super capable these days. And all the reasons that Joshua points out here, they're just super friendly and accessible to development because everything runs on them. I also feel like that capability that VS Code has

to do the debugging on a remote system, I hear from so many people that write into Coder Radio that love that kind of stuff. And not just specifically that, but we have people that write into Coder Radio that are on Windows and Mac because that's what they use for their day job, but they have a Raspberry Pi running that they can execute builds on and stuff or a VM or a VPS.

Like, that's so cool. Casey, you're doing Rust on there? I'm doing Rust-based robotics on there. I have a blast working on it. Yeah, the tools that are available for the Pi inside of Crates.io, which is the Rust package manager, are top tier. And actually, when the Zero2W first came out, the Rust devs had support for the Zero2W before a lot of Python devs. I was really impressed. That is very impressive.

Dang. What I feel like is really amazing about the Pi that I'm learning and will soon get a chance to play with is its versatility. And I know there are like about 12 different Pis to choose from, from old ones to new ones. Pick the right one, Brent. Well, it turns out you can't get any of them, but I feel like that's its real advantage. It's just a platform for people to throw their ideas at and see what comes out the other side, which feels like a beautiful thing. Yeah, low cost, low risk, but all the possibility. Yeah, I want to say thanks to our audience again. It turns out New Wes has a Pi 4 2 gig that he has offered to ship my way, which is really great.

So I, you know, despite betraying you both, I think I might have a chance to jump on the bandwagon. So thank you to New West. I've been wondering how we're going to do this. Because now that I know you've never tried a Raspberry Pi, I want it to be a good experience. I was going to say we want to be there. We want you to document it.

Yeah, we definitely want to document it. But I feel like I wish I could be there to guide you through the experience because I want to set the expectation right. I'll say this, like if you set it up and expected to use it as a desktop, I think your first impressions would be bad. But if you wanted to set it up and use it as a Docker system or a way to run a couple of packages, I think your impressions would be good, right?

Like it's so you have to make sure you don't necessarily buy into the hype that it's like a desktop replacement. Because that's been said for years, and it's definitely getting there. And with faster storage, it's closer to being possible, but it's definitely not quite there yet. And so you just got to go in with expectations set right. I think we might need like a Brent's Pie road trip. We could just like drive around and then come up with ideas on the road. I'm imagining a photo essay sort of thing

where you're taking pictures of you with a pie at various like monuments and parks. We will like go to different places, get inspiration for what it could do. Yeah, it'd be like a $3 million trip, but totally worth it. Yeah, low budget. I think what I will work on actually

that we can talk about a little bit more in the future is I think I'm going to put together a list of hopes and dreams I have for things I think it might be able to do. Like for instance, one thing I've always wanted, because as you gentlemen know, I tend to record in this space with my laptop and we've just been talking about how laptops are sometimes problematic when it comes to microphones. I've always, for like the last three or four years, wanted a little setup that would just be my little recording machine that's completely silent, no fans, no nothing, no like electronic noise or anything.

And I'm curious to know if you think that's even possible with this thing. And I think the answer might be no, but I'm curious what you think. I think you're going to have to try it. Yeah, I mean, you could try it, right? So a Pi 4 has a going to have to try it. Yeah, I mean, you could try it, right? So a Pi 4 has a pretty good little CPU on it. I think you're probably going to run into disk I.O. issues. You're going to want to run your OS probably off a USB disk and probably not off of an SD card,

which then means your OS disk is consuming a lot of your USB bandwidth, so you don't have a lot of bandwidth left over for recording to the disk. So it'd just be tricky. It might be doable, you know, but it's just something you'd have to play with. Reaper is available for the Raspberry Pi. Yeah, right. And then it's got that handy little web interface even, too. Yeah, that's true.

Wes and I have also talked a lot about this. We've thought about this, too. I don't know why we haven't actually tried it yet. Well, because, you know, turns out these x86 boxes do a pretty damn good job, so we just stick with that. All right, well, we

did get some boosts. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's totally understandable. This is part of the value for value system that the new podcast

apps support. And so when listeners have the app, one of these apps that supports us, which is really only a small handful at this point, we've been using Fountain and Castomatic, but it's iOS only. But the neat thing is, is when you're listening, you can use the Lightning Payment Network to send Sats, Satoshis, to the podcast. So it's a direct way to support the show without going through a payment process or something like that.

And JB actually runs its own node so uh the payments literally come to the studio and are held here at jb1 uh which is pretty neat like they're not in some clouds server somewhere or you know safely in a bank account so please send them there faithfully in a bank account. There's Yolo'd in the studio. So please send them there. Actually, you know, when it comes to money, you want to be careful.

But it's really not about the money. I was saying this on the pre-show. Like, I've been doing this for a while and this is my absolute favorite way to get feedback from the audience. It's just neat to see it originate from the episodes, you know? It's sort of like a, like a, oh, it's, you're right it originate from the episodes, you know, it's sort of like a, like a,

Oh, it's you're right there with them as they're listening and experiencing the content. It feels like I'm hearing from a new set of people too. And, um, it's just so, I don't know.

It's so novel too, but all right, we got one here from Dale and, uh, Dale's boost came from last week's episode, Brent's betrayal. And he writes, I made this little tool that helps me pay JB while listening. It's the value for value calculator. And this is really for anybody, but it lets you kind of figure out like, okay, if I want to send these guys two bucks, like how many sats is that? This is handy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You put two bucks

in and that, uh, let's see here. He says, I am no crypto enthusiast. So I just tend to think about these things in dollars, which feels more real to me than some blockchain coinage. But he still made this, which is so awesome. Like talk about actually truly trying to support, right? Like he kind of gets where this kind of maybe has to go. And also I wonder if, if we push this, and I know nobody else in our sphere is going to push this, but maybe someday in a few years when people realize what's going on and they start pushing for this, I feel like we could get something here that works for open source too. And who knows what it'll be one day,

but I feel like we're testing something out bigger here. And Dale sent 500 sats to say that. I don't know what 500 sats works out to even. That's because you're not using the value for value calculator yet, Chris. Right. We also got 500 sats to say that. I don't know what 500 sats works out to even. That's because you're not using the value for value calculator yet, Chris. We also got 500 sats from Anonymous who said, no to Discord. I can't use it without doxing a phone number. And you know, I have heard that from multiple listeners when I talk to them in person and they say, oh yeah, I'm not on the Telegram group or I'm not in Discord. I don't want to give them my phone number. I don't think we can really appreciate how many people we're excluding because they're not participating in the conversation. So they're not

getting representation. It's true. So I don't know who Anonymous is that sent 500 sats to make that mention about no Discord because of the phone number thing, but that did resonate with me. So I appreciate you sending that in. And that's something I'm going to take into serious consideration. Hopefully, hopefully we'll see you on our in. And that's something I'm going to take into serious consideration. Hopefully we'll see you on our matrix. Wes, you earned the network a few sats. Dave Jones sent us 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sats.

I like that number. What is that? Can you do the calculator? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Dave Jones, he's the creator of Helipad, which lets us read these boost messages. And he says thanks for helping me bug fix helipad guys here is a bug bounty so do you want to just give us like a super brief synopsis on what actually let me set it up okay because you will not give yourself the the freaking credit

that you deserve because you are a mad lad and so here we were on last sunday during the superbowl and it was after the show where it was still daylight out and the Super Bowl was still going. And instead of going home, what Wes Payne did

is he helped us troubleshoot. We were having an issue rendering these boost messages because, you know, they come in, they get stored in a database and then Dave has this back end Rust app actually.

Yeah, hella bad. Yeah. That kind of acts as like this API that we can, it has an API that we can connect to and get the messages. And it kind of is like this backend tool to pull those messages. And he's built a frontend that displays them, but it wasn't working. We could see the messages were in the database, but the frontend wasn't displaying the message.

So like the legit mad lad that he is, Wes sat down during, I don't know, the last So like the legit mad lad that he is, Wes sat down during, I don't know, the last half of the Superbowl and before the Superbowl was over, had rebuilt portions of the entire app in Python. So I don't know, in like an hour rebuilt 20, 30% of the app in Python,

got it querying the backend rust server to troubleshoot what the issue was, reproduce the bug in his own app that he had just built during the last half of the Super Bowl, tracked it down to like a weird character that was in the database, removed that line from the database and fixed it, and then sent the info over to Dave. That was really well done, Wes. Well done. Well done.

Nobody else will give you the credit, but I was there. Hey, we had a lot of fun. And it was a great excuse to learn a little bit more about like the Lightning Daemon and Helipad and Umbral and just how all some of these neat tools work. Yeah, it was actually very educational. It turned out to be a really, really good kind of under the hood. And I walked away even more impressed, actually. I really like it. That's one of the areas, I think, depending on, you know, whatever your interest in crypto

generally, a lot of these tools are very familiar to us, like self-hosting, loving Linux users. And so they're very accessible to just play with. Very exciting too, to like, to cut out any kind of payment processor means that nobody could censor us. Not that we really even say anything that would be censored, right? But just the idea that that's not a threat anymore. Well, or just as we've said before, you know, not everyone loves PayPal. I don't love PayPal, but all kinds of different things. Like you don't have to necessarily worry about the affiliation of the middleman that you have to choose to go do business through. That is a huge thing. A lot of people in free software don't like PayPal.

That is something I have run into a lot. All right. Last one. We got a thousand. Oh, by the way, Hydra looked it up. One, two, three, four, five Satoshis is about $4.70. Well, thanks, Dave. Isn't that great?

Yep. So we got a thousand stats from another anonymous who came in on episode 444, much to do about Ubuntu, and he said I'm pressing boost to pay my respects for LadyJupes. Or too soon, I don't know. No, actually, so we did get out

of the rat town that we were in. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it was bad. And we hired professionals. We actually, we and a few other people, like it's all getting taken care of. It's all getting addressed. And, you know, we were kind of shaken up, actually. I won't lie, because after Tucson and then getting stuck in the woods and then getting out of the woods and getting a rat that chewed up some of our electrical wiring and mad props to my wife, who like learned on the fly with from brent on how to like rewire this stuff while i was down here doing a show and we got out of

there and we went to the coast and we got this beautiful spot on the coast where i had the most epic shot for for starlink so i was getting like 200 megabits down on my starlink oh baby glorious and we spent about three weeks out on the coast i think it's been about three weeks two and a half weeks we just left on saturday and uh it was a real nice reset and i spent a couple of mornings watching otters fish man those things can swim you know they sit there all playful and but when they're hunting they move like a missile underwater and i actually saw one of them get a salmon that salmon put up a big old fight flopping all over the place. It's so wonderful when you're just around nature like that. Yeah, yeah, big old crane birds.

It reminds you to get outside of yourself a little bit. It reminded me also why we did the RV, why we chose to do the RV thing. And, you know, my whole philosophy was that is like, yeah, maybe I could do that one day, but I don't really ever plan to retire. yeah maybe i could do that one day but i don't really ever plan to retire so i'd rather do this stuff now when i'm in my 30s and 40s than when i'm in my 60s and 70s uh because i'll tell you what it is a ton of work load and unloading and packing stuff up it is a physical job and so god knows i'm probably not going to be in better shape when i'm in my 60s and 70s so i figured do it now and it was really a nice reset and reminded me um i don't think we've repaired all the damage i still

actually i am manually rewiring my slide right now i go underneath to the controller and i switch the wires around so i i always push the extend button which is up but i switch the wires so up is now reversed to in or out or whatever you know like so i reverse the in and outs and i do it manually it's working but we still have more wiring repairs to do we're not completely fixed but she's operational enough that we can do work you're not in pure manual mode right exactly i'm not like breaking a rib trying to get the slide in so it's it is in a much better place now. And we had a really great time on the coast and the kids absolutely loved it. They just loved being on the beach so much.

They did so much fricking exploring. So it turned out to be really great, but thank you. Anonymous. We are still, we are still making fixes and we have more fixes to do. So I appreciate the thousand sats, which is probably like a buck,

but lady jupes. Yes. All right. We got to bust through these picks cause I was rambling on today. I, you, did you find spot cast? Yeah.

All right. Spotify. These bastards love to have RSS shows that could just be on the open web locked up behind their app. They're probably even powering the damn system with RSS, let's be honest, right? You know what I'm talking about, and so Wes came across

Spodcast, which fixes this. Yeah, it's a caching Spotify podcast to RSS proxy. So you do have to do some setup, you know, there's some get your Docker going, and then it basically talks to Spotify's API via some Python. So you've got to sign in with your Spotify account to get access to that.

But then it'll run and build you an RSS feed that you can play in any old player. Right. So you've got to have the Spotify account, but this thing handles all of the Spotify interactions for you, and then you just plug that into your app of choice. Now, I've got to be honest, I don't have a Spotify account these days, so I've not actually tested it. But I could imagine if I did, or maybe there's some shows

that you could only find on Spotify, but you just want in your regular old podcast player or antenna pod or something. Well, and maybe your favorite show gets deleted. They've pulled a couple of creators recently, and they've pulled episodes from back catalogs before. This would be a great way to just back that stuff up if you're a collector. That's a pretty neat pick.

So we'll have that at linuxunplugged.com slash 446 if you want the link to that. But then get ready. We got a whole batch of Rust picks. Ah, man, you know, I've wanted a replacement for that boring old watch command for so long. Right? It's one of the worst. So old-fashioned. Yeah.

I know. We'll rewrite it in Rust. Like, all of these core utils seem like they're getting rewritten in Rust. Stuff that's, like, just I've taken for granted for 20 years is just getting completely redone in Rust these days. So why would I want Rust Watch, or what do they call it, HWatch? Yeah, HWatch. Well, it's easy to install because you can just download the Rust app. They've also got a DEB, which I tried here on Pop! OS on the Kudu, which worked just fine. All right. All right. Do you need it? No, probably not. But does it

have some niceties? One, it's got some color support, which, hey, that's handy right there. It can also show you to do some clever difference tracking. You can kind of scroll through the differences as well. And then it also, it's not just like a dumb pipe. You can scroll through the execution result. So just like a little quality of life upgrade for your terminal experience. All right. You got me.

You got me. You got me. That actually sounds pretty great. We got another one. This one looks like it's a note taking of a form, right? But not like regular notes. Now, this is more like if you're trying to doodle or draw or add annotations freeform. Maybe you've got a pen on a tablet, something like that, or a touchscreen.

And it's available on FlatHub. Yeah, and it's GTK4 too. So this is a super easy install. And we have had people that have written in and asked us, do you know of an app we can use with like Wakem style pencil interfaces? And always asking us, how can I use this on Linux?

R Note seems like the way to go. Also, if you just want an easy to try out GTK4 first application that does something a little different, R Note could be a great way to go. Or maybe you're a developer and you're curious to see

some GTK4 and Rust interactions. Maybe take a look in the source code. All right. Now I know you're a dog man you're curious to see some GTK4 and Rust interactions. Maybe take a look in the source code. All right, now I know you're a dog man, so tell me about Dog. Well, it's another Rust app. Yeah, that's right, our last one for this episode. It's a command line DNS client. I know, you need another one, right?

You're probably still doing host or something terrible, or still using dig, when you could be using drill. No, now you can use Dog. Oh, I like dog. D O G is easy. It's quick. It's short. It's easy.

I like the little catch line here too. Dog can look up. Dog is an open source DNS client for the command line. It has colorful output. I'm noticing a trend with us. That's pretty great. Oh God, of course.

And it can also output the results as Jason, right? It's also got, um, you know, DNS over TCP, DNS over HTTP support built right in, too. So if you've got some of those modern, fancy DNS going on, you want to be able to query that with first-party support, that's great. And yeah, JSON support, maybe you're doing something you shouldn't or setting up a crazy little shell pipeline, dog could fit right in. I think as soon as Brent and I saw JSON support on there, we're like, oh yeah, this is why Wes is a fish. Oh yeah, here we go. That's got Wes written all over it.

You don't have to grab and do text parsing, it's data. You know, it's fun when we do a lot of picks. It's been a little while since we've done a whole bunch of them. We usually try to reserve it to just one and make one really good one. But sometimes you just can't choose. Those are all good. And you know, there's so many Rust apps coming out these days.

If we just did one a week, we'd never get to them. We couldn't keep up. No, no. All right. Well, I think that's probably everything, yeah? I think we're all done. Man, that laptop's been fun. Gonna be sad to see it go.

But now it must get packed back up. Probably for someone else to review, I would imagine. Oh, they're gonna have fun though. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if you want links to anything we talked about today, LinuxUnplugged.com slash 446. Do remember, we do have that Leplug getting together. They get together before the show starts. We do the show on Sundays.

JupyterBroadcasting.com slash calendar is your place to do that. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. I didn't know you called YouTube a bat station these days, but okay. You know, I, I, I guess the hip thing to do would be to like follow and do the bell thing, right? If you're on the YouTubes or if you're on the Twitch to do what they do on Twitch, which is whatever. I don't know. I don't know. But, you know, the Podping folks that are part of Podcasting 2.0 are working on announcing live streams in podcast apps.

So your podcast app could tell you when they're live. I like. It's probably a year or two away, but they're laying the groundwork right now. All right, that's everything for today's episode. We'll see you right back here next Sunday. Maybe I should start running an ad for the donations. You know, because we only have one sponsor right now. And the show's kind of built around a two-sponsor format. You could do like a Jupiter.party.

Can we come up with a really, like... Yeah, we need like a great ad. We need something that's really good. We need a little jingle music. Yeah, somebody that could create it. We need a director and a producer. I'm going to need a character to play. Obviously, you're going to need a little jingle music yes yeah somebody that could create it we need a director and a producer i think i'm gonna need a character to play obviously you're gonna need a character sort of a how about a burnt out podcast host yeah yeah yeah maybe like a cowboy hat character for me i don't know why but like you know with like a lasso and i'm like i was thinking maybe you had

like a gold pan in your hand oh yeah or what about like we'll podcast for food sign that's pretty much what it is dude it is yeah you weren't gonna do the show until i brought those tacos