LINUX Unplugged - 451: The NixOS Challenge

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

We explore what makes NixOS so powerful, and why it might be the future of all Linux distributions. Plus we announce a community-wide NixOS challenge for the month of April.

So this is one of those weeks where all three of us have kind of fallen in love with a new distro. We're all feeling that new distro energy right now. Yeah, I'll admit it. Thanks, guys. I can totally tell Brent's feeling it because it's been like link after link after link this morning. And he, well, he told us that, too. He's actually even making songs. He's made songs to honor his new distro that he's fell in love with.

Well, when I listen to any music now, I just can't stop thinking of my new love, you know? You just can't stop that feeling, Brent? Is that what it is? I'm hooked on a feeling, Chris. I'm hooked. Oh, you're hooked on a feeling. 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, guys.

Thanks for joining me on what is going to be an adventure, a discovery, if you will, an emotional journey into a new distro. Okay, maybe not quite. Maybe we're overselling a little bit. But we have met a new distro, and it's no average Linux distribution. This week, we're going to announce the Nix Challenge. We'll have details on that in just a little bit. And we're going to give a go at explaining why we think Nix is

interesting. And even if you never plan to use it, maybe just try to give you a mental framework to think about why people find it interesting. And then we'll round it out with some great boosts, maybe some picks, maybe some more. So before we go any further, before we get into any of that, let's bring in the virtual lug that is packed today. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Hello, Brian.

Hello, Wes. Hello, howdy. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you in there, everybody, for joining us. Can you feel it in the air?

It's fresh distro season. GNOME 42 is officially out. Like, new things are happening. It's like springtime. Everybody's planting their open source gardens right now. I guess I'm in a good mood, I guess. Yeah, I mean, well, well, you should be. It's been one of those weeks where behind the scenes we've just been really nerding out super hard.

So it's like we finally get to come on air and talk about the thing that we've been enjoying all week long. But where do we start? And the other thing that we've been waiting to do since last episode is give another go at getting Linux on the M1 MacBook Max. So this is a decked out MacBook Max. And last week, we attempted to install the Asahi Linux Alpha. We really did. But there was a file system corruption issue. Yeah, I don't know what you've been doing with this thing, buddy, but actually, no.

Apparently, at least as Hector Martin tells it, this is more common than we might have thought with APFS, which is too bad. Yeah, he kind of tweeted that like right after the show came out that, yeah, we're hearing this from several people. And we actually got that file system issue resolved right after the show, but we decided to hold up. We just hold up right there. We're not going to go any further. We would wait till we were recording again to resume. So Wes Payne, brace yourself because it is time to install Linux on the MacBook Max. Here I go. How are you feeling about it this week?

I think you're probably feeling better, aren't you? Yeah, good. I mean, I'm hopeful there won't be any booting into recovery and having to learn, refresh myself on Disk Util like last week. We'll see. I mean, the APFS FSEC did complete, and the installer now walked in just enough to see that it sees the new free space and partition we were able to do.

So, I don't know. There could still be more dragons lurking here, but I do have a good feel. So how much disk space are you given the Linux install? What have you decided to allocate to it? Do you recall? Because I think we have about 1.5 terabytes free on the internal disk on that thing, which, you know, there's no upgrade in that storage. Yeah, we have 1.9 terabytes.

I gave it 80 gigs. Oh, okay. A test install. Yeah. No, that's no upgrade in that storage. Yeah, we have 1.9 terabytes. I gave it 80 gigs. Oh, okay. I was just being... A test install. Yeah. No, that's fine. We can always massage too. All right.

So we've been looking at our different options. We think we're going to go with, what, maybe the minimum? Or are you going to try to go all the way up to the desktop? Are you going to go for desktop? I think you probably should. We should probably go for desktop, right? Yeah, I was thinking minimum because that's how I think I'm going to be using this is like a headless setup. But you might still want the desktop for troubleshooting. Yeah, I think we

should go desktop. All right. Okay, Wes Payne, we'll check back in with you momentarily. So he'll have that going during the show. We'll check back in to see if we managed to get Asahi Linux on that sucker. And, you know, it's funny because back in the day, you might go buy yourself a big ThinkPad or Dell or maybe even a System76. And your goal would be to dual boot Windows and Linux on there for those few things you still needed Windows for. And now here we are in 2022 and the situation is sort of flipped. It's now you can dual boot Mac OS and Linux, which I could see that working for a lot of people.

And then you can at least have the option of Apple's hardware, although I'm not convinced yet. It's still the values there for Linux users, but we'll see. I want to mention that we have a meetup just around the corner on April 9th in Raleigh, North Carolina. Details at meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. It's just outside Raleigh. There's going to be a park that we'll meet at, and there is a barbecue joint and a brewery there. What more could you ask for? There's a lot of people. So Brent is booked. He's official, Wes. So now you've got to get yourself.

Oh, I'm booked too. What? Congratulations, gentlemen gentlemen how exciting is that that's really fun wow it's gonna be a it's gonna be a good showing because i think we have already something like 70 people 72 people on the meetup yeah i mean it'd be rude not to go right so we're getting to the point where if you think you can make it do do sign up to the meetup i know it's a pain in the butt but please do so that way we can give the barbecue place a heads up because there's a lot of meat that's going to be required um and brent's going to help you out he's going to he's going to skip meat for that night just for you guys out there but we're still going to need

better numbers yeah thank you brent thank you for doing that so meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting i'm looking forward to it because alex and i are going to try to record a self-hosted in person. Ooh, a rare treat. And if we got the opportunity, I think he has enough microphones that we could all kind of sit down all the Friday stream and record something too, possibly. So anything like that would probably end up on the extras. Extras.show, I would think. So even if you can't make it, maybe we'll try to get some of the content published over there or something. We don't have any specific plans at this point, but there's even an RSS for it.

If you can't make it to that meetup, we do have something even sooner. It's the week this episode is airing just a couple of days, March 31st. I am holding a live stream at JBLive.tv. 31st. I am holding a live stream at jblive.tv. It's an opportunity to just sort of do an AMA. If you've got any questions related to the shows or to the network. That's a Thursday. What time is it?

4 p.m. in Seattle, 7 p.m. in New York, 11 p.m. in London. And I'll also be giving away some Bitcoin to help people get their Lightning Wallet set up so that way they can participate in the booths. A little Bitcoin booth. Yeah, so that'll be at jblive.tv on March 31st.

I've got to get that on the calendar. I've got to get that on the calendar. After the show. Yeah, right. I'll write down calendar. Brent, will you write it down too so then you remember? That way we can actually get it. Oh, yeah.

I've already been doing that. I like that you're just sort of using Brent as your memory bank now. That's great. Because I don't know if he writes it down, he'll remember, you know. Chris and I actually call it his memory palace. Thank you very much. Okay, Wes. How are we doing over there?

Anything? Oh, we are stub OS installation complete. We set up a pre-boot volume. We set up a recovery volume. We've collected some firmware now. Is this all happening? We're installing the OS. Is this all happening in macOS?

Yeah. Let me see the screen. Let me tilt it over here so I can. So this is actually what's kind of noteworthy about this is this installer script that they've built that you're running is running in a terminal window right along your web browser inside macOS. Yeah. That is really cool. It's actually running in the fish shell right along your web browser inside macOS. Yeah. That is really cool.

It's actually running in the fish shell that I installed under Nix, but that's a separate story. We'll get to that, Wes. All right. I am feeling pretty good about this. We will check back in. So this week we want to announce a Nix challenge that we're going to run for the month of April.

Now, this is not a big deal. It's going to be a low key thing. We may end up being, I would imagine, a topic of conversation at the meetup. But here's what we're thinking is you could join at any point in the month of April. We're going to have this challenge running for the whole month. And I hope that the goals are totally achievable for anybody that's got a few hours over that month period, they can invest into this. So the goal, one of the top goals, this is particularly personal for me is I need to study the Nix expression language. So I understand what I'm getting into. We're

going to explain more of this. So don't worry. We're going to, we're going to set some of this up for you. You got to set up at least one Nix system. Doesn't have to be anything super complicated. You have to be able to install HTOP. And you need to join the Nix Nerds Matrix room that I set up on the Jupyter Broadcasting Matrix server. Just as a side note here, our Matrix community is really incredible right now. It's at that perfect size where there's enough people in there that we get good, robust conversation, but everybody's really respectful and everybody is

sort of helpful to newcomers. And we just set up this Knicks Nerds room and I set it up like Friday night before I left the studio. And I just created it and I told one person, I said, hey, I'm going to make this room. I think maybe this is where we'll talk about Knicks as we start talking about it on the shows more. I opened up Element Saturday morning, and there was already nearly a dozen people in there nerding out about Knicks.

That's how passionate people are. Like, it just exploded on its own. Yeah, you were kind enough to invite me to the room, and I was like, how long has that, have I just missed that this was around? No, No, it was just created. It just got started. And I will put a link in the show notes because people in there have been so helpful answering some of my newbie questions. And it really helped me kind of wrap my head around a few concepts that I was struggling with. And it's they're not pushy. They're not pushy. So here's the goals.

Learn a little bit about the Nix language. Set up at least one system. Install HTOP. Join the Nix nerds matrix room. And then post a screenshot in that channel of your Nix system. And if you want meaningless points that won't count towards anything, post a screenshot of like a full Plasma or GNOME or i3 or whatever floats your boat desktop. I would also say maybe try setting up a server, you know, spin up a

LNode or something and do something you would have tried in Docker or in a normal, you know, on your CentOS or Ubuntu box and see if you can get that running with Nix. Yeah, it was so much fun. And each one of us had a little kind of journey of, okay, I'll give this a go. We'll take a look at this. And then as we started looking into it, we really kind of just started getting super excited. So I kind of want to cover why we're interested in it

and why we're suggesting that we all do an Arch-style Nix challenge, you know, from the old days, like bringing that forward now to Nix. Because in a lot of ways, Nix feels like an OS that I may make my future primary distro for a lot of stuff. Like I feel like a big shift is happening here. And I thought I'd kind of get into why a little bit. So I think I think it's a fun challenge. Join us for that. And here's the sort of overview of what we are loving about Nix. In real simple terms, this solves a couple of big problems that I have. And one of those is we have a fair amount of infrastructure that we need to build out,

but we have a very limited amount of time to actually apply to that effort. And then additionally, we'll deploy stuff and it will remain in production for a year to even, I mean, in the cases of like JBot, a decade, I don't know, 12 years, I don't know how long. Is it still running? And you get, you come back to these projects literally sometimes five, six, seven years later and there isn't appropriate documentation. It's really not clear what we were attempting to do here. Don't really understand why it's set up this way.

And I just got to use that. I got to accept that technical debt because I don't have time to solve that. And I got to move forward. And then you end up building up a bunch of technical debt over time. So Nix, and Nix is a package manager. And NixOS is a base base real bare Linux system that's built using the Nix package system. It solves that problem because it documents everything via its

configuration file. Everything that you put in there, you can read it and you understand how the system is set up and then it will build that exact system. So if a system goes out, you reload from that config file and it reproduces the exact system as you had it. And that is really compelling when you think about, we could create a JB base Nix config that had a certain set of users, SSH configuration, base packages that we use, maybe tail scales installed by default, all these kinds of base setups that we could then deploy on our cloud servers and our local infrastructure. And it would always be a very common setup. And you can accomplish a lot of this through things like Puppet or Chef or Ansible.

There's a lot of Kubernetes, really. There's a lot of ways to solve this problem. But Nix is solving it at the system level, right? It's solving it deep at the base config. And when you use it with NixOS, you can actually build the whole system with this. But you can also install the Nix Package Manager on a lot of distributions and even macOS and I think maybe Windows? Don't know. But I tried it on CentOS Stream 9, and it was great.

Oh, nice. It was a real nice combo. Okay, so I've kind of given why I find it super compelling. I wonder, Wes, if you could give kind of an overview of what maybe I've missed or what you find compelling about Nix. There's a lot to go into here, so I'm sure we'll figure out the best ways to talk

about it as we go on, but there's Nix, the sort of lazy functional language that you use to describe the system and packages. And then there's like Nix, there's a whole bunch of Nix tooling. And it's a build system that lets you declaratively build packages in a reproducible fashion in a way that really understands the graph structure of how dependencies all relate to each other

in a more sophisticated way than we're kind of used to from some of the traditional Linux packaging. Yeah, my understanding too, like in there is when it's building software, it'll actually build it in a sandbox and really has a genuine map of all of the dependencies. And that is in part what makes it reproducible. And say, maybe this is a crazy example that nobody would ever do, but say you're a guy or a gal that likes to run the Plasma desktop

and you love Plasma, you're all in on Plasma. I know a few of those. And you're talking about it all the time. You're talking about how great it is. And then the new GNOME 42 comes out and you're like, that looks great. I'd love to try that. But I don't want to have both Plasma and GNOME installed at the same time. I don't want to have multiple terminal emulators and file managers and libraries. What a mess, right? I don't want that. Yeah. And I mean, in theory, you know, you can strip those things. Oh, sure.

But you kind of got to figure out all the things that it actually installed. And I never do. I just always. It hangs around. Yeah. I just always install the other desktop. And then whenever you're doing your autocomplete, you get the wrong terminal. It doesn't match the desktop.

Or like when you're browsing through the menu, it's like I've got so many entries in there now. So in a NIC system, you would go into the configuration, and you'd probably have like a sub-configuration file just for your graphical environment. And you could essentially in there change it from a Plasma system to a GNOME system and then rebuild that box. And it would build clean as if it had always been a GNOME system from the very, very beginning, as if you installed it straight off the ISO like that. And what's great is it will test all of that.

It will make sure all of it builds correctly and works before you actually have to accept the changes and activate it, which is really powerful too. All right, so I'm sorry. I just wanted to make that example, Wes, but I'm sure there's, I probably interrupted you right in mid thought. Well, yeah, it's just that there's like a lot to Nix. You've got this, you've got a language to describe how to build things. And

in the case of NixOS, construct a system, and then you've got tooling to make that happen. And then the way it all works with the Nix store, and there's a lot of details that we probably won't get into for this episode, but it means that you can have all these packages safely co-installed with different versions in a way that you can go back and roll back at any time. It also means that you can bring those packages with you. A lot of the Nix tooling is set up so you can just install the Nix Package Manager. You know, if you're on your Mac desktop or it's on a Linux server, you can do both of those and that'll work just fine.

And then, so there's those things, there's the tooling, and then there's Nix packages, which is a repository. Well, actually, it's really, you can kind of think of it as a giant Nix expression in the Nix language, but it's a big whole set of Nix expressions that describe how to build a whole bunch of packages that you probably want already. Yeah, and that could be all kinds of things

from VS Code to Plex, Home Assistant, Nginx. Htop, you know, normal Linux stuff. And then you can just use that to assemble. You know, it can build it from source because it has a powerful, you know, build tooling built in. But then there's also a whole bunch of caching infrastructure that the project maintains, which is awesome. So it means, you know, if you're on a commonly supported architecture

like x86 Linux, then yeah, you're going to pull down the binary stuff by default. So it's all surprisingly fast, which is one aspect of this I didn't really think about. I talked a little bit in self-hosted this week. I think it was episode 67. I've had a lot of success, and we have a lot of applications deployed in productions

that are in containers, Docker and Podman at this point. But when I look at building a system with Nix, I actually see a future where maybe I'm not using containers as much as I thought I was and that I'm actually using Nix to manage most of my software, which I think I'll get into in the future, maybe next week when we actually kick the challenge off. There's kind of that element of, because it's also nicely separated out in the, in the next door and isolated from each other. There is, you know, that initial excitement when you first got into Linux and you were like, oh, the package manager, there's all this software I can just install. But before you learned about how like a box that had six dozen things on it that had sat

for a year, wasn't a great pattern. Some of that excitement has come back with Nix where you're just like, oh, but I can do it in a more maintainable, declarative way right out of the box. Yeah. I want to let ETU get in here, because I know that you were a contributor

for many years to Nix. And so maybe you could give us a little more nuance on how the package manager is working. It's source, but there's that binary cache, right? Yeah, so the thing Nix does is that it has the Nix package tree definitions

on your local system, and then it evaluates which packages it needs, and each package will have the set of instructions for building a package is based upon all dependencies and the instructions for that package. And then we just hash it down to a hash.

And then you can ask the binary cache, do you have this hash? And then the binary cache can either send, no, I don't have that hash, or send back a binary. And then you get that exact software hash back. I see. So if it says no, then it just builds it? Yes. Aha. That hashing technique is really cool. This also makes it very easy to patch software locally.

So you can, in your configuration, just say, I want Mumble, but with this patch applied to Mumble. And then it will build Mumble every time you update, because some dependencies changed. But at the same time, if you don't want the patch, then you just get it from the binary cache. So you have kind of the power of Gen 2, but you can choose to when to build or not to build pretty much. Yeah. Brent, this is a pretty different approach to how a distribution

is built. It's a different way of thinking about even managing a system. You know, they call it a declarative configuration. And I'm curious to know what your take is coming at something that's probably a pretty new way of looking at Linux. Yeah, when you first suggested that we really dive into this, which we've been thinking about for months. We've gotten mail from various listeners.

And for months now, I've been slowly gathering articles that describe why we shouldn't do this. So I was super skeptical to dive in, especially that this felt kind of, like a perfect Wes way to build a system and maybe not a perfect Brent way to build a system. Hey, ouch. I feel judged over here. No, no, no, no. I think it's a compliment actually.

That's a compliment for sure. More of a compliment, for sure. More of a developer's approach. I've looked at a few accounting softwares, and some of them are user-friendly, and some of them are really developer-focused. And they seem really interesting. And then I start getting into them. I'm like, I don't have the skills for this. And so Nix felt like that for me at first. So I probably spent 80% of the time we spent doing research just trying to understand what this all was and if I could even get into it. legacy Linux ways of doing things and sort of flips them and gives them a whole bunch of features that I have secretly been trying to learn for a few years. Places where I think Ansible seems

interesting and I know we'll talk more about that. But Nix feels like, at least NixOS feels like a way of accomplishing a lot of things all at once. And once you wrap your head around it, it's super user-friendly in a strange kind of way. So that's what excites me is that the learning curve, I think, for the concepts was like, oh, this is just a total paradigm shift, which I think are important to explore and are worth the time of trying to wrap your head around. But then the actual implementation I found actually surprisingly easy, which is great. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And you go there to support this here show.

That is fast, reliable cloud hosting right there. Go try it for yourself for a project. Boy there to support this here show that is fast reliable cloud hosting right there go try it for yourself for a project boy i just i slipped right into that i apologize i just get excited about linode you know and then i get into like a cowboy mode yeah it's natural did you know i got uh i got a centos box going on linode that has uh nix installed on it nice and they actually have a guide if you want to do NixOS on Linode. It's a great example of why I love Linode. They just let you go

all the way if you want. You know, also, I happen to notice that the Linode CLI, that's packaged in Nix. So, even better. That is. That is so great.

I love that command line tool. And they have a great API and they have fantastic documentation. You bring all that together. That means if you get a wild hair or if you have something you need to build, you're going to have the support in both documentation and actual customer support to pull it off. They have great 24 seven, three 65 customer support. They don't do that escalation thing or none of that. You just get your problem solved. And they've been doing this for 19 years

and they've learned they need to constantly invest in their infrastructure and their tooling. And so they're doing it. They just are relentless about that. Rolling out new hardware and new features all the time. They always give me something new to talk about all the time. You know, like right now they're rolling out a beta of a database as a service.

And it's so slick. It's all the great stuff about Linode, but brought to like managing a database for you and they've just got done upgrading their fast rigs to mvme pcie storage so that's always screaming and they they took the time they spent the effort they did the hard work to make their network connections as fast as possible and they became their own isp i mean i could go on and on and on. So just go try it yourself. Go give them the unplugged boost and go say hello and thanks for supporting

by going to linode.com slash unplugged. Get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account and you support the show. It's linode.com slash unplugged. All right, Wes Payne, let's check in over there on the M1 Linux install. How are we doing? Oh, we're doing well so far.

I've proceeded through a prompt where I was quite carefully warned to read carefully lest I leave the system in an unbootable state. So you just skip right past that. Yep, skip right past that. I've now shut the system down as instructed, and I think we're getting ready to reboot into Asahi. Yeah, things have been extracted and installed. So it's off right now, and you're going to power it up. Yeah, we had to wait 15 seconds for the system to fully shut down.

It's important that the system be fully powered off before this step. So does that imply that when you turn a Mac off, it's actually still on for 15 seconds? It kind of does, yeah, doesn't it? Huh. That's an interesting little discovery. All right, well, it's actually still on for 15 seconds? Kind of does, yeah, doesn't it? Huh. That's an interesting little discovery. All right, well, let's turn it on. Let's see here. Do you have to hold down a button?

I do, yeah. Press and hold the power button. Hmm. All right. Then you'll get a boot menu. Loading startup options. Okay. Once I see a spinner or it says entering startup options,

I'm supposed to release. Okay. Got some options. You do. You do. You got a spinner? Yeah, here you go. Take a look.

Oh, and hey. Look at that. There's an Asahi Linux boot entry. They even have their logo on there. That looks good. Click that, Wes. Click it. Let's see what we get.

All right, booting up. But why is it the macOS booting? It said that you might see a recovery screen for a second. You will briefly see a macOS recovery dialog. Okay. Sometimes you might be asked to select a volume to recover. Choose your normal macOS volume. Oh, yep, okay.

I bet I can do this. I made Wes's user avatar poo. So he's the poo emoji. It's appropriate. I'm an adult. I'm an adult. All right, should we check back in, or do you think it's going to go quick? We'll see.

I'm just about to. The installer popped up here, so we're running some recovery installer scripts. So, like, we've got to fix something on the main Mac install? No, I think it's just using this environment to help bootstrap itself. Oh, interesting. So, if you were going to do Nix or Fedora, you'd still have to go through this part, wouldn't you? Yeah, they do have an option when you're installing it. You could do the

desktop Asahi Linux install or a minimal sort of install, which is Arch Linux ARM. But then they also had one that just sort of bootstrapped the Linux environment and UEFI. And I think from there you can install other stuff. I think that's the base that the OpenBSD early support goes off of as well.

Local policy update is in progress. Oh, we're getting updates. It's asking if I'm sure we want to do something. I don't really know what it says. I'm going to hit yes. Go for it. YOLO, Wes. YOLO, mom.

You only MacBook once. But no, that's not quite right. Yeah, this wasn't an expensive machine at all, so it doesn't matter if we break it. I feel like we'll have to come back. Yeah. Because, you know, I've kind of... I got more Nick stuff to talk about. Alright. Come back to me.

Alright. You give me a... Installation complete. Pro center to reboot. Okay. All right. Come back to me. All right. You give me a boy. Installation complete. Press enter to reboot. Okay, okay. Hold on now. We can't go. We can't go. We got to finish this up now.

Oh, boy. Let's see, Wes. All right. Don't you have to hold down the power button or else it's going to go into macOS? I don't know. It just said press enter to reboot. I think you got it. Oh, no.

Oh. Asahi is the default. Asahi logo. U-boot logo oh it's going wes oh that's a good sign all right we got grub what are you doing hit enter come on let's go what's it doing what's it doing holy What's it doing? Holy shit. That was fast. Whoa. Whoa, Wes, that's a win right there, though. Holy crap. Yeah, we got plasma setup going on. Holy crap. So here's what happened in studio.

I was like, come on, Wes, hit enter on the grub. And Wes hit enter. And then the next thing that flashed on the screen was the Plasma desktop. It was that fast. It was remarkable. That was really great. So that's fun. So now we have a Plasma desktop going on the M1 Max.

We're going to give that a go. Ha-ha! Look at that, Wes! Nicely done! Now, gentlemen, I know we've been playing with this for a few days now, but I want you to go into details. Chris, what did you do that got you so excited? I know we all took different routes. Tell me about yours. Mine started when I was thinking about my home setup. I talked about this recently on the show. I'm thinking about redoing everything. And I was thinking about these problems I want to solve

about trying to understand how I put a system together after I look thinking about redoing everything. And I was thinking about these problems I want to solve about trying to understand how I put a system together after I look at it a year later, trying to make it really simple to recover during an outage because I don't necessarily just have a few days set aside to fix something. And trying to solve for these problems. Essentially, it all started for me

when Home Assistant decided they needed to upgrade their Python version and were dropping support for my Z-Wave integration, and I realized I had to redo my whole setup! Python version upgrades. It's such a reasonable thing. I totally understand it from a project standpoint, but it causes me such a huge amount of work

that I just decided, well, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to just rebuild my entire home network. And now my thinking is, depending on the status of Asahi Linux, I think instead of using a couple of Raspberry Pis as my home servers, I'm considering doing Asahi Linux on an M1 Mac mini. Oh, consolidating down from the Pis onto one beefy, beefy M1 system. Running Nix. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the connection here yeah and uh i think i would run a lot of this stuff natively in nix and not in containers i'm not totally sure about home assisting yet but i have to test it so my journey was just that brent i started essentially building a parallel version of my home server in a Nix VM. Jupes Network 2.0. Yeah, and just to see like what are the pros and cons of doing this.

And that's when I realized like, oh, geez, this is a game changer in how I'm going to manage my systems. And I don't really see me using anything else because you really just have to figure out that nix language and how to structure that and then once you have that problem solved you can just read the config as documentation it self-documents it's so simple to deploy and it's i can run it on an m1 i can run it on an x86 box i can run it on a raspberry pi like it's flexible and it's very simple you know sort of one of the things that appeals to me about an Arch system is that it's a

bare system that I build up as opposed to maybe a more traditional distro that you kind of pare down, perhaps secure with AppArm or SELinux and you kind of pare it down. Much like Arch, NixOS is very bare and you build up. And while initially that often comes with some additional setup overhead as you're getting going and more things that need to be tweaked initially, it has sort of been a universal truth that the simpler the system, the longer it is maintainable, the simpler it is to update, the less problems it tends to have, et cetera, et cetera. And so I find that to be really super compelling as well.

And it solves all these problems. I was thinking like, do I go proxmox and set up like a NUC and maybe I just do everything as VM. Like it just, all of that goes away. It all melts away when I look at the way Nick solves it for me. It too has some advice there. Maybe Home Assistant stays in Docker, but it's interesting that you have the option.

Yeah, so it sounds like that's sort of not like a great experience i saw somewhere on the website i think it's like 70 supported or something like that at least they give you a number yeah but wes i wondered i think you were playing with a few containers and such so i wondered if you had some insights in this or at least tell me what avenue you went down. Yeah, well, okay, so to start, one thing that you pointed out in the excellent NixOS manual was to mention that because, you know, it's really easy to get Nix bootstrapped, Nix the package manager bootstrapped on systems,

you can kind of install it in interesting ways. And from the Arch side of things, I've always loved that you can, like, bootstrap Arch systems from existing Linux, and you can do the same thing with Nix and it's so much simpler. I was really impressed by that. So I spun up an Alma Linux box and that was working fine, got it up to date. And you just install Nix the normal way and you run a couple of commands. There's a command to generate the new NixOS system, NixExpression,

config, and then it command to generate the new NixOS system, Nix expression, config, and then it can generate all the new boot stuff for you. You move your old boot out of the way, and you reboot, and then it's smart enough to go figure out all the stuff under your old root. It'll just move out of the way, set up the new Nix environment for you, boot

into it, and then you can preload it with SSH keys and even a hash of what you want the password to be. So it was kind of just like, run a couple of commands, edit the config a little bit to configure the system I wanted it to be, reboot, and then I was able to just SSH with my SSH key into the new system, and it was an Xbox app. That's so rad. Doesn't that feel kind of magical?

And then you can actually roll back to the old system if you want or you just rmrf slash old root and it's gone. That is, that's fun. You've assimilated that machine. That's what you've done. Whenever you go into

one of these alternative systems, you know, I think some of the docs even say like random stuff you download or binaries like that's probably not going to work on Nix just because of how different like the NixOS and the Nix store setup is from traditional Linux systems.

So you have to wonder like, okay, why am I going to have all the apps that I need? What kind of escape hatches do I have? And so I wanted to explore a little bit like, well, what would it look like? We run a lot of our stuff in kind of simple container setups right now. What does that look like on NixOS?

So I got traffic installed, but just in Nix. In NixOS setup in the config, you know, you just kind of say services traffic enabled equals true, and you can set everything up with let's encrypt. You specify the traffic config in your Nix right there, which was really neat. And then I tried a tool I'd seen mentioned in some of the community called Arian,

which is sort of like a Nix wrapper on top of Docker Compose. And so you use the Nix language and you can specify, and then it's a separate tool. You can integrate it directly into Nix if you want, or it can kind of run on its own. And then that used the built-in NixOS

support for running containers either with Podman or Docker. Or I'm sure there's other run times too. Those are the two I played with. Right, right, right. Well, that does sound like a blast. I think it's one of those, I was talking in the Matrix NixNerds room, it's like one of those things

where I've been looking at it almost solely as a server platform. And people were like, oh, no, no, no. It also makes for a great desktop. And I just haven't made that connection yet, but I could kind of see it here in like a studio environment where we want we want really predictable, solid Linux workstations. I could kind of see it, Wes. So depending on the way that this challenge goes in the month of April, we may end up deciding to actually use NixOS on our studio recording systems, I think. I think that's going to be the determining factor out there.

What do you think? You down? Yeah, I'm down. Oh, it's exciting. It feels to me like much how we use scripts to set up sort of the environment on top of the OS on some of the studio machines. Now you're using sort of a script to just define the entire system. And so it's really just a progression of what we've already been doing

in a really beautiful way. You know, when I started looking at this too, I was very much in the headspace of Nix versus Ansible, right? Because we were trying to solve multiple problems and we were starting to think, well, maybe the way to do all of this would just be to manage our infrastructure with Ansible. And then I started looking at Nix and I thought,

oh, well, no, screw Ansible. We're going to do everything with Nix and it's just Nix for everything. And as we've talked and as we've looked at it, I don't actually think the two are mutually exclusive. And so I kind of want to encourage people not to kind of get hung up on the whole, like there's a lot of ways to manage and define a system aspect of it. I mean, it's definitely a part of the discussion, but I think there's a lot of compelling good stuff in here to look at.

And I would like us not to get too hung up on that particular aspect. Yeah, and just like that those two tools and all the tools in this space, like there's a lot of overlap and then there's parts that they address entirely different or don't necessarily compete on as well, so that they can all be useful. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting future because I tried to do it on SUSE,

and I ran into problems. And I don't know what this means because I know we promised to run OpenSUSE on our server, but if we kind of are redefining everything and we end up wanting to go with Nix, I don't want to rule it out, but that's an awkward thing we're going to have to resolve. Right. But we have until the end of the challenge, I feel like, because it may very well be that we get to the end of the challenge

and we decide not to. I don't know. We're just really at the very beginning of this. Yeah, okay. So we both went down kind of the server route, but Brent, you, you braved NixOS and the desktop, right? You say brave, but it seemed like the thing to do. Mostly because I felt like it solves one of the problems I've been trying to solve for years too. And so it seems to me like that's what defined each direction that we, we went into, but I decided, yeah, the desktop feels like mostly what I use on a daily basis.

And it feels like over a few years, any OS I've tried always gets kind of crufty and things start to like fall apart at about the like two or three year mark. And I don't know, maybe it's just a feeling, but this seemed like, oh, maybe this is a way to not ever get that, which was very interesting to me. So I booted up the NixOS Plasma ISO. Of course, I went Plasma. And I thought, OK, well, one of our challenge objectives, you know, one of our goals that we're putting out there is to install the desktop. And I'm surprised neither of you went that direction, but I sure did. And it was

fascinating because it forced me to change the way I see a desktop system. So for instance, installing was almost exactly how Wes described, you know, I used the seemingly wonderful NixOS generate config to just kind of grab the current system and make a configuration template out of that, which I thought was really magical and made it so easy to just dive in. So I enabled a few things in there, but upon rebooting, I learned a lot of things. So I rebooted into the installed system, which was fast and great. into the installed system, which was fast and great. And then I realized that none of the changes that I was making, so for instance, dark themes and bookmarks in Firefox, or even just history, like bash history,

none of that was persisting across reboots. Which you'd kind of like, right? Well, I thought that was essential for being a usable desktop environment. And then I just reminded myself that the system gets sort of erased and regenerated on every reboot, which is a new concept to throw your head around. And yet one of its strengths. So I had to actually add a home directory to my user in the config, which seemed like the thing, because my home directory was getting recreated on every reboot. So, of course, nothing was persisting. So as soon as I added that, that solved the problem. But that was one of the moments that really solidified to me also some of the strengths of this approach, which is that everything you want or have defined is there when you reboot

every time. And the cruft kind of goes away on every reboot, which is really fascinating. And another thing, Chris, that I've only got interested in, but I know you played with, was that there's some modularity to the config file, which I thought was really fascinating. Yeah, back in my day, we called them includes, right? But they're just essentially sub-configuration files. And so I have like a VPN.nix that I can put on all of my Nix boxes, and I have, and it just defines everything to install and connect to Tailscale right as I build the system.

It's so great. And, Nev, I noticed something you said in the chat room, maybe you could mention here in the mumble room, it kind of changes the way maybe you view a Linux box. And depending on your perspective, it seems pretty practical. Yes. As like the home labber over like the last 12, 13, 14 years, I've ultimately learned that every Linux distribution that I've ever installed on a client system, I've always just learned to treat that as install as disposable. Right. I was just saying to Wes before the show too, it's like, it's a difference between a toy and a tool. And NixOS feels very much like a tool. And if you take what Linux is really great at and you turn it up to 11, I think it really exemplifies a lot of that.

And I think it would make for a really good rock-solid workstation for somebody like Brent. I think once you wrapped your head around it, you'd have something that's super reliable for you and probably safe and secure too. You know, something gets weird, you just reboot. That's nice. Well, and the rollback features too seem really great because you can try something new for a little bit and then roll back to them. So it integrates, I think, some modern technologies that I've been craving. So you might have tempted me, Chris. No, I do think it means, you know, you're kind of committing to staying at least a little bit engaged with the Nix language

and understanding how Nix works a little bit if you're going to base all your systems around it. So that's one thing to consider. Similar with other configuration management systems where you've got to learn the language of the system that you're using. But if you're willing to do that, and that's where I'm kind of fascinated about this challenge to see. Because for me, I'm a software developer by day, so kind of used to reading new programming

languages. But I'm curious to see, and this is a, you know, sort of ML inspired, functional, pure, lazy. It's probably different than languages you guys have seen before. So I'm going to be fascinated to see how you guys get on with it. I will totally admit upfront, full disclosure here. This aspect of Knicks is probably why I have put this off for as long as I have, because the audience has been asking us to talk about Knicks years since like 2004. But, you know, the truth of the matter was, is I just felt like, is it worth learning something so specific and unique? But what I have realized is, and this is, I'm sure a lot of you out there can relate to this because you've probably experienced this. You maybe are like aware of something and then you begin to look into it and you begin to learn more about it.

And you discover it is an entire world unto itself that has a ginormous community with passionate contributors. And you just kind of sometimes, you just stumble across these kinds of things every now and then. You're like, oh, there's something wonderful here. That's Nix. And you realize this is worth investing in because this community and the available packages and everything is so rich.

The payoff is obvious once you understand the depth of it. So that is a transition for me because I didn't really want to have to go to school to figure out how to install my software. But now that I realize it's going to help me solve these problems that I've been recently, I've had a mind shift change. And you guys have probably noticed a lot that we've talked more about Bitcoin. We've talked more about boosts. We've talked more about decentralized services like matrix. We've been

talking more about this kind of stuff because I've kind of recently, I don't know, maybe I, maybe it's because I've turned 40. Maybe that maybe it's just because I've hit like the 15 year mark of doing podcasts. And that kind of feels like a point to reflect. And I've been thinking about how I want to build things for JB over the next couple of years, so that way it sort of just can run itself after a certain time. As sustainable as possible. Yeah.

And that's been a full-spectrum thing, like how we distribute the shows, the back-end infrastructure, the front-end infrastructure, how we monetize the shows, all of that, right? That's all been in here. And so to come across Nix kind of during this time and seeing how it can solve some of the problems that I'm facing, that's a huge deal. facing, that's a huge deal. And it reminds me very, very much of why I even started the Linux Action Show to begin with, is I was in IT and I was crazy excited about the problems I was solving with Linux. And I just felt this undeniable urge. I just couldn't stop myself. I had to talk about it. I'm still that way today. And that was really my motivation for starting the show. And it was the problems that it was solving for me that I felt like I needed to tell people you could solve these problems with

Linux. And like it was things like Samba and NFS and Squid and Apache. And I just felt like the world 15 years ago needed to know you could solve problems. And I feel like we're arriving at another precipice where Nix is solving some serious problems. And I'm really excited about that. And value for value models and lightning network payments and boosts are solving some real problems. And I'm very excited about that. And I just want to pull on a conversation that I had with my co-host, Mike, in Coder 458. So we get into it more there, but, um, a group that does

studies of the podcast industry, um, Edison research recently published their latest version. They do one every year of kind of a state of the podcasting industry. And I, last year when they did their report, if you wanted to reach 50% of all weekly podcast listeners, so if you're a, I'm talking about you, if you're a weekly podcast listener, and if you wanted to reach them as an advertiser, you targeted like the top seven podcast networks and platforms. But one year later now,

there has been considerable acquisitions of independent shows. And in just 12 months, now to get 50% of those weekly listeners, you only need to buy advertising on four podcast networks. So in one year, we went from seven to four. Spotify, iHeartRadio, NPR, SXM Media. These are the main platforms where people are consolidating to. And Edison Research ends with this quote. They say, if indie podcasters don't find a way to organize and consolidate their buying power,

some monetization options are just not going to be available for them, for you. And I think what they're saying there is there's going to be less and less advertisers because between platforms like YouTube and the fact that you can go to Spotify and iHeartRadio and NPR and get 50% of all listeners, why would you spend three to six months creating an ad deal with some, you know, smalls and twos? Right. This is a dramatic problem. And I think recently I said I think we have three to five years. I think we probably have two years at best. And this is something that I've kind of thought was coming for a while. That's why we launched

the membership programs. That's why we have the Unplugged Core Contributors. Thank you so much. And we also have the Jupiter Party. This has been part of hedging for the direction this is going. And we knew, I could tell personally, I could tell just maybe, I don't know if it was just the economy, if it was just, I don't know if it was just the economy, if it was just, I don't know, the shift from work from something changed in the advertising business. And I could tell that we needed more runway. We needed more flexibility. I needed to be able to say no, because we get all kinds of people that want to sell scams on air. They really just all kinds of scammy stuff. And I have to be able to say no to that kind of stuff. And the membership programs have really been key to that, but it's like it can't be the only solution.

So that's why we've been talking more about boosts and the podcasting 2.0 movement and value for value. And so that's why, again, I want to mention I'm having a live stream on March 31st. I'm going to give away some Bitcoin to help you load up a lightning wallet. I like Fountain FM as an app. Castomatic is a great app, but just go to newpodcastapps.com. There's always new apps getting added there. Anything that supports value for value and boosts will work. And you get that set up. We'll have all the details on the live stream. I'll help everybody kind of get started on that because my thinking here is that if we get some of the podcast listeners on this network and then an open source project comes online, they already have a network of listeners that are just ready and willing to support. So I'm not going to go on about this every episode. I really am not. But it is sort of,

there is kind of this coming together of all of these almost kind of movements in history. And I want to just talk for a moment about it. And then this will be the episode we address it. And then we don't have to keep talking about it all the time. value for value because I think it applies to free software and I think it applies to content creation and I think there's a lot of reasons why we should pay attention to these kinds of things so boosts lightning and value for value are not all the same thing we talk about them all a lot together but they are not the same thing value for value is a support and content model. It was pioneered by Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak about 15, 14 years ago. And as time has gone on, it has sort of continued to prove out for various different reasons that that model is likely the most sustainable model for independent content. And the idea is, very simply as the name implies, we, Jupiter Broadcasting, all of us here, all of us on the show, we put our value into the show, our time, our talent, and our treasure.

The audience gives value in return, your time, your talent, or your treasure. Your time can be maybe helping out in the JB community like so many people do. Maybe you're like Cole or New West, you come up to the studio or the RV, or maybe, maybe you just take your time to introduce someone to the show, right? That is a contribution. That is value given back to the show. Your talent could maybe be a, um, helping out JB with something that's social. Maybe it's code. Uh, maybe it's mechanical, right? It's something you're taking your unique talent and you're helping contribute value back using that talent. And, of course, treasure is really straightforward, and it's often the most available to anybody who's busy, you know, has a lot going on. You're often in a position where you don't have time to contribute your talent, your skills. You've got a lot going on. So value is the most straightforward way to contribute. And the Lightning Network is a free software peer-to-peer payment network

that enables sending fractions of a penny for stupid cheap fees to send that value. Boosts are a brand new way to send messages into the show along with a contribution of value, which is sent over that peer-to-peer free software lightning network and to give the boosters value back we try to read as many of those boosts here on the show as we can because that's kind of the content aspect one of the content aspects of the value for value model if you send us a boost as a thank you in return

for value we try to read that on the show. This model, if you think about what I'm talking about here and you remove the technologies like Lightning or PayPal or whatever it might be, this is a platform agnostic model that can be applied to whatever model works for your business. So in our case, it's a combination of memberships, direct value for value, treasure contributions, and more and more limited sponsorships, right? It's kind of like a basket of these revenue sources. It is a model that can be resistant to content censorship because the advertisers are just part of that basket. We could, in theory, eliminate them. And because it is not necessarily dependent on a PayPal or a Stripe or a Patreon, it is a sustainable platform.

So not only is it resistant to censorship, but is a sustainable platform for the next 15 years of JB. And the way we're using it with Lightning Payments, the entire stack is built on free software and runs on Linux. The entire stack. For the first time ever in the history of my business, the payment stuff is now runs on Linux. The entire stack for the first time ever in the history of my business. The payment stuff is now running on Linux. This is huge, right? It's completely self-hostable. And because the actual value side of it, the monetary side of it in the value for value system comes from the audience, it's as sustainable as there is an audience it's powered by the audience so this is a 15-year solution and it's a strategy that aligns completely with jb's values like this

this makes a lot of sense it's using free software it's orienting our primary focus towards the audience as our main customer and i think we're figuring all of this out at a critical moment in podcasting and mark my words this is a path that we are going down that other podcasters are going to follow. And eventually I think free software projects will follow. This I think has a lot of potential. And so that's why it's been brought up more on here because it's just, it's like a matrix of all this stuff coming together, Wes. Yeah. There's a lot going on right now. Yeah. There is a lot going on right now. And so so that's that's just sort of the phase of the time that this show is in this show has done this

before like I've said before you have your Star Trek the next generation which is planet monster of the week great show really good show right that's Linux action news right that's Linux action news and then you got your deep space night where you got your character development. You got your story arcs that go over a whole season. Surprising betrayals. Don't even get me started on Kaiwen and Golda Kahn. But, you know, that's what this show is. Right. And this is that phase. And you can probably feel it. I would imagine if you've been listening for a while, you can probably tell. I would imagine if you've been listening for a while, you can probably tell. And if you're savvy enough in this particular area, you can probably get a sense that I might be right. But the implications are a little scary and the details seem a little difficult. And I acknowledge I have gotten really passionate about this. You know, I've jabbed ribs when I didn't really need to because this is my baby, right? These shows, podcasting, it's my life's work at this point.

I've been making podcasts since listeners were burning them to CDs and listening to Linux Action Show and Castablasta on their CDs in their car. Pretty sure you've been making this kind of stuff before I knew what Linux was. And so it's really at a fragile, interesting inflection point. And to see research that sort of really demonstrates that, even though I knew it already, it kind of does make it a little more alarming. And it seems like we have an opportunity here to build a network. And the great thing about it is, like, it's not super easy to get started today.

I admit, the onboarding is a pain in the ass right now. And by the way, if you're in the US, the easy way is just to get the strike app. It's really low fees. It's a good team. It's a good, simple app. You can buy just a, just a small, tiny amount, a couple of bucks worth of Bitcoin, and you can send it via lightning to your podcast app. The Strike app, get a little bit in there, you send it to your podcast app, you're done. It takes minutes. It's really, it's really nice. If you're outside the US or even in the US, Blue Wallet is a really good, safe, trustworthy mobile wallet for Android and iOS that has in-app purchases for Bitcoin that you can then send over Lightning to your podcast app.

And I am risking pissing off a lot of my audience by talking about this so much. That's a real problem we have. People are sick and tired of hearing about this. But what would you do? What would you do if you helped pioneer a medium and you have worked your ass off for 15 years full timetime to make that medium possible, and now you see something that is an existential threat to it. And you see something that has a real possible solution. A real network effect is being built here. And the great thing is, is while onboarding is a pain in the ass today, there's a lot of companies working on that, right? This is a problem because it's an open network.

It's like SMTP. It's like POP3. Other people are building solutions on top of this open network and they're solving problems and they're making it easier. So today, yeah, it's a pain in the butt and it seems kind of hard.

Like for the podcast hosts, you got to get this Umbral thing and then you got to go figure out what the podcast index is and then you got to go figure out what the podcast index is. And then you got to figure out how to embed a value tag. I mean, that just all sounds really complicated. And you got to do it on all of your feeds. Right.

And then, you know, as the audience, like you got to figure out how to get your hands on, like it doesn't have to be a lot of Bitcoin, but a few, you know, like a few pennies worth. And you got to figure out how to put that in a wall. And it's all very complicated today. But let me tell you, I've been talking about this for 12 years bitcoin and it is so much easier today than it was 12 years ago to get your hands on this safely and to just have a really slick experience like it's like linux it just keeps getting better the experience just keeps getting better. The experience just keeps getting better. People keep building on top of it. And when you revisit it, you realize, wow, something has really changed here. It's that same kind of effect.

So that's my end of my soapbox. It's done. I'm really going to try not to talk about it anymore. In part, this comes up because the live stream is March 31st. That's sort of the apex of all of this. After we give the Bitcoin away and we get people loaded up with their wallets, we'll be done talking about it. And I do want to mention,

because I think this is noteworthy and I think it's really awesome, Bearded Tech, who is a listener, who is working on an open source project called Fever, which is a Frigate event video recorder. It works alongside the Frigate video recording system that works with Home Assistant

that you can plug your cameras into. Yeah, this just looks great. Yeah, it's like a free self-hosted camera viewing app. It's really nice. And he's built some really cool features in Fever, and he's just a few days away from putting his project on the Lightning Network to take contributions as a value-for-value model

and to take that value over Lightning. He will be one, but the next person will start a trend and it just kind of grows from there. And what an opportunity we have right now. So of course I have to talk about it. It's almost negligent because quite frankly, I think most of my peer group doesn't even understand what the hell I'm talking about. And so they're not going to talk about it because it's so damn complicated and there's scams around every corner. They don't want to they don't want to go on air and tell you guys to do something that's going to get you scammed or something like that.

Like they're just going to sit this out for a bit. Let Chris figure it out. You know what? He figured out a lot of this stuff first. Right. Let him figure this one out. He can burn his ass on this, piss everybody off. And then if it actually works out, then I'll sign up and we'll get it working.

It'll be fine, right? Like that's the state of things. So that's what we're doing here right now. That's the stage we're in. But it's moving quick. So anyways, join me for the apex of it on March 31st. And before we get out of here, why don't we do some boosts?

And now, as the French say, it is time for Le Boost. Well, Jay wrote in two days ago. Thanks, Jay. He says, you convinced me. Boosts. I'm already a fan of the Brave browser and its model to use attention tokens to give back to creators.

Longtime Linux user. First distro was MCC Linux in 1994. Once a career and now a hobby again. I've become a system admin of humans rather than machines, i.e. a psychologist. And that's why it's fun again. Love your podcast. A sysadmin of humans. That's amazing. Isn't that great?

I like Brave. I'm still figuring out if I like the bat tokens. I think I get it, you know, but I'm still, I'd love people's input on that too. Send us a boost and let us know what you think about that. Bitcoin Lizard also wrote in with 25,000 sats. Chris, I've been listening to you since roughly episode 60 of Linux Action Show. Wow. Yeah, I know. I took my first hard look at Bitcoin as a result

of your podcast, Plan B. Do you remember that? I'm happy to see you promoting the value for value model from the Lightning Networks. It's truly powerful to be able to support content creators in an uncensorable way. Thank you for the amazing content that you've provided for the last 15 years.

We don't have to read that part. Don't read that. That's embarrassing. Well, I don't know. It seems kind of nice, but all right. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard, for sending that in. I hope you made a good chunk of money. Because if you've been listening since Plan B, I looked at the last recorded episode of Plan B, and I think the price of Bitcoin

at that time was $124. A different era. NorCal Geek boosts in with 5,000 sats. Commenting on Linux Unplugged 450, it went real bad. I enjoyed the GNOME 42 review, Solange preview. Looking forward to getting it in Fedora 36. Yeah, us too. Keep up the great work. I appreciate your honesty. Ah, thank you, NorCal.

Miss you. It's been a while since we've been able to meet up with him. Yeah, no kidding. By the way, I saw that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed shipped 42 this week. So they technically, they got it first. We got to give them credit.

Also, Clear Linux shipped it. So got to give them credit. Also, Clear Linux shipped it. So got to give Clear Linux some credit too. Go get that GNOME 42 however you have to get it. Remaking Eden wrote in three days ago with a thousand sats, also in response to episode 450, said, I really hope that the value for value movement gathers momentum. It's the first so-called Web3 project

I felt like I can get behind and will do some good. I'd hate for Spotify to gobble up something as important as podcasts. Web3 is kind of a nebulous term, which I guess can encompass anything that has blockchain. Value for value itself, again, that's a content and monetization model. Lightning is the payment network, right? And Bitcoin is the form of payment. Does that make sense? Yeah, right. And you can use those things to implement something in the value for value system.

You got it. You got it. You got it. Matthew wrote in 5,000 sats four days ago. He says, hi, thanks for the show. Do you know when Fountain will support Apple CarPlay? That's the only thing that keeps me on Apple Podcasts. Fountain, yes, does not yet support Android Auto or CarPlay,

but I happen to have it from a reliable source that it is the number one requested feature and that it is going to be released soon. Nice. Yeah. Eric Padre writes in four days ago with 2,000 sats. Let's go Linux community and lightning. Let's bootstrap this.

Fantastic idea. And that was it. That's it. That's a short one. I expected there to be more, but then I realized the other bullet points were just notes to ourselves. You know, there's a character maximum,

not a character minimum, Chris. You know what? I like the short ones, actually. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for sending those in. So the way you send in a boost is you go to newpodcastapps.com. You get an app that supports boosts like Fountain. You charge up that Lightning Wallet, and then you send one in.

Boost to Graham. Yeah, that's great. That's, I don't know. I feel like I've officially gotten it out of my system, and this livestream thing is happening this Thursday. I hope you'll join us. We have a special guest that's going to join us and do a brief interview. We're going to do the Bitcoin giveaway.

Of course, we're also going to help you get Matrix set up. And last but not least, of course, somebody, a friend, maybe Wes, is going to join me. We'll chat. I don't know. I feel like there's something else I'm forgetting that's going to be on the live stream. But we have a good show planned. You said special guest, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We'll chat. I don't know. I feel like there's something else I'm forgetting that's going to be on the live stream. But we have a good show planned. You said special guest, right? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bitcoin giveaway. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Matrix setup. Ask Chris anything. The AMA stuff.

That's what I was forgetting. Oh, I thought you were going to say Levi there for a sec. Maybe he could make a special appearance. I mean, he's kind of, you know, he's hard to get. Yeah. He's booked out. That's true. If you'd like to get more show, go check out LinuxActionNews.com.

Wes took the week off, but he'll be back this week, right? Yeah. Right? Of course. Of course. We cover the tech news, what's going on, so don't miss a single episode, LinuxActionNews.com. It's like, we should probably consider a combo feed, now that I think about it. Whoa.

We have the all-shows feed, but we should about it. We have the all shows feed but we should if people would be interested send us a boost tell us that. Yeah. Arbitrary feed remixes? Yeah.

And also you can always join us on Sunday at jblive.tv we do the show at noon Pacific 3pm Eastern we got the mumble room going that's always a lot of fun

we got the chat room going we don't have the jblive FM stream going at the moment but we will be working on that. We will. We've got the chat room going. We don't have the JBLive FM stream going at the moment, but we will be working on that. We will. That is in the plans. It just went out.

Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But links to everything we talked about today are at linuxunplugged.com slash 451. The show's RSS feeds are over there if you'd like to send it to somebody. Recommend your favorite episode and send them a link. We appreciate that a whole bunch.

And, of course, join us on our matrix details at our website. Thanks so much for joining this week's episode of the unplug program. See you right back here next Sunday. All right, jbtitles.com, let's go title this thing. It's worth mentioning, before we get out of here, we talked all about Nix this week, but Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 have their betas coming out. And both these are big releases, because 36 has that nice, beautiful,

upstream GNOME 42. And of course, 2204 is going to be an LTS. So that's also one that really could have some value to get as much testing as possible because that just has a lot of long-term benefits for the Ubuntu community. So that's exciting. It's a busy week.

Get out there and get your beta. Yeah. Right. Which, you know, I got to get 2204 going again because I got 36 installed right now. Same, yeah. Hmm. But I feel like I need to give 2204 a couple of weeks. There's a lot going on.

There's too much. Oh, we got the Knicks challenge. Plus then during the, during the middle of April, we're traveling or the early part, early part of April. So that's kind of why, one of the reasons why I wanted to make the Knicks challenge a month long is

because I wanted to give people who are busy a chance to participate. Yeah. And also since all of us are traveling to North Carolina in a couple of weeks, like I don't think there'll be a lot of Knicks testing going on that week for the JB crew. So I wanted to give us a little extra time in there. We have some pretty long flight rides. So I feel like there might be Knicks in the air. Hadiyah and I are already talking, though, about maybe watching like a new TV series during that time.

So that time may already be claimed. You know, like that's the debate right now. I was thinking of Wes, really. Come on. Oh, yeah. Wes will probably spend his entire time just trying to hack the in-flight wifi to get free internet.

That's always so fun.