LINUX Unplugged - 453: Raleigh Action Show

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

We just wrapped up our East Coast meetup and have a bunch of great stories to share. Plus some Nix ups and downs, and more. Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

Sometimes there's these news stories that come across, and you're like, what is going on? Like, what must be happening behind the scenes to make this story a reality? So Microsoft is working on AMD GPU hot-plugging for the Linux kernel. Not AMD, but Microsoft. Yeah, I guess this is targeted at the data center? Microsoft said in a quote that, we believe the support of hot-plug of GPU devices can open doors for many advanced applications in the data center for the said in a quote that we believe the support of hot plug of GPU devices can open doors for many advanced applications in the data center for the next few years.

So data center use, maybe for like adding GPUs to virtual machines and then removing it? Yeah, Michael Arbol at Pharonix kind of speculates that this is for Azure, hot adding and removing of AMD accelerators for VMs, exactly. What a wild, wild world. And this, you know, wouldn't be possible unless AMD was contributing their code to the Linux kernel. And so now they get to benefit from the developers at Microsoft improving the capabilities of their hardware product.

I mean, it's for their own interest, but... Well, on the flip side, right? Like, Microsoft doesn't necessarily have to work directly with AMD. As long as they can get it reviewed and accepted upstream of the kernel, they won't stop at all. and accepted upstream of the kernel, then what's stopping them? Hello, friends, and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, guys. How great it is to be in the same room with you. Coming up on the show today, we just got back from our big East Coast meetup.

We've got some great stories, some observations about our fellow Linux users, and a lot more. Plus, we're going to round it out with some boosts, some picks, and much, much more. I would normally introduce the lug right here, but we had technical issues because we're on live location, so we're not going to have a virtual lug today. I apologize ahead of time. It's heartbreaking. Wes stayed up all night creating some sort of great, powerful contraption to make this happen. But unfortunately,

I came in here this morning and I tore it all down. Didn't know what it was. And so we just don't have a mumble. Well, it had become sentient. So I think that was the responsible move. Yeah, it was a tough choice, but the show must go on. But we do have so much to get to. And you're going to hear from a ton of audience members anyways that perhaps it's okay i hope so we're all hanging out here at alex's house today it's pretty great so thanks for hosting us alex you're very welcome that is until my neighbor starts shoveling gravel from his truck well it is a nice day out so you know we gotta get yard work done that is the only thing but we've i've been here since thursday brent i think you've been here since thursday we all I think you've been here since Thursday. Do we all come in on Thursday?

No, you came in on Wednesday. Yeah, I came in on Wednesday. Yeah, yeah. I did come in on Wednesday, but I stayed at a hotel the first night just because we came in so late. But it was Thursday that the team really assembled. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I came in. I decided, wouldn't it be nice not to do like a red-eye flight, to just do like a midday flight?

How reasonable. So in the Pacific Northwest, we flew at like 3 p.m on wednesday last week and then we landed in raleigh around 11 50 midnight and we didn't want to like wake alex and his wife and the baby up and we thought we'll just land and do one of those like right next to the airport hotels just you know wham bam quick and easy yeah so we roll up to uh this place called a micro hotel they call it a micro hotel which is like really guys what are we doing it's just like a cheap crappy hotel that's been refurbed three times that's like a step above a nanotel though it's better than a nanotel though. It's better than a nanotel. So we go in there and as I'm opening the door, this guy rushes past me and he's like in a panic and he just like kind of brushes us out of the way. And you know, we got our luggage and everything. So we're kind of like taking up some

space and he like kind of slams in past us. Doesn't speak a lick of English. So he takes forever to get his room booked. Even like leaves for part of it. And then the guy tries to like book us and then he comes back and he's even more than a panic. And anyways, so that's not a great sign, right? But we're starving and we're tired. So I figured your room,

get some food, go to bed. Yeah. Let's just get this over with. I'm excited about getting over to Alex's. That's going to be a lot nicer. Let's just do this. So I reinstalled the damn Uber eats app on my phone, which I just deleted because I was swearing off Uber Eats, right? Because it's so

crappy usually. But I figure, you know, the wife's hungry. She's got diabetes. She's got the low blood sugars. I'm going to take care of the situation. Oh, look, the only thing nearby is a McDonald's for a $4 fricking delivery charge. Okay, fine. Fine. It's 1am, right? So the moment we get the room, like the moment we get the room number, I place this order on Uber Eats, right? And I'm a little kind of apprehensive about doing this because I'm like committing to be in this place for an hour at least if I do this. And I'm not sure this is the hotel we want to be in because my initial impressions is maybe like they're cooking something in the lobby, but I don't see anything being cooked. But it sure smells

like something's being cooked. But I think to myself, maybe in the back room, that guy made himself a meal, you know, just ran the microwave. What kind of smells are we talking about here? Ethnic. That's it. Like all I can say is like smells of food, clearly food, but not food I could identify. I couldn't like, it were all like meals I've never personally eaten, but I'm like, oh, that's what food smells like. Strong,

unknown food. Yeah. Very strong. But you know, the lobby, maybe they have a kitchen, right? I don't know.

So after we get all checked in, after I placed my order, we get in the elevator and the elevator smells like burnt rubber real bad. And what do you think about? Like you get in a row, you get in an elevator and it smells like burnt rubber. It doesn't sound like what you want. You're thinking maybe like the, like the tracks are bad. Like the little wheels it might have are bad. And what do you think about? Like you get in an elevator and it smells like burnt rubber. It doesn't sound like what you want. You're thinking maybe like the tracks are bad, like the little wheels it might have are bad.

If there's one vehicle you would really rather didn't smell at all, it would be a lift. Yeah, right, right. And okay, so we get up to the second floor and we step out and it's a whole new set of food smells. Totally separate, totally different. Maybe that's like a part of their brand. You know, you get like a themed smell per floor. Right. And then as you walk down this floor, second floor, you walk through different zones of stink. And I would actually probably describe it as stench. And you would think that every single hotel room had a kitchenette where they were making their own individual meals, although there are no kitchenettes in this entire hotel.

And it's like probably three or four different phases of smell as we go to the very end of this hallway. Because of course, you're walking down this torturous stench. And of course, our room's at the very end of the hallway. So you got to walk past all of the stench. My wife described it as a bouquet of stench. So then you get to the door, you open the door up and boom, you're hit with a totally different smell. Oh, you finally learned what your room's custom smell is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's been sitting all day, and it was a humid day in Raleigh, so it is moist in our bedroom, right? And we're from the Pacific Northwest, where you don't really have that kind of, like, hanging humidity. And so, like, it smells horrible. We are damp. It's 1 a.m., and I'm already on my second Uber Eats driver. Like the first Uber Eats driver is already noped out. And I'm on my second Uber.

I'm looking at the tracking screen like, where's my damn burger, right? So we look at the bed. We pull back the sheet, the cover, you know. There's like a big liquid stain. And then like hair on the stain. And then it's just sort of like artfully placed at the tip of the stain, a cigarette hole. Like I'm serious. I'm so serious right now. Did you take a picture for Instagram?

I did not because I was in a bad place at this time because I just wanted to eat. So we're sitting there on the bed, kind of like huddling together, like on one edge of the bed on this like queen mattress or whatever, because like the other one's just completely like a no-go zone now. And this second Uber Eats driver just like nopes out. And I'm like, two Uber Eats drivers have noped out. We've got a third one at this point. I'm like, okay, well, what's going on? This driver has been sitting at McDonald's for like 45 minutes. It's almost 2 a.m. My wife's got, you know, low blood sugar. I'm trying to get her fed. Like, let's figure out what's going on here. So I text this guy and say, you know, everything. Okay. I send the text message. Two seconds later, food's on the way. The guy's driving, right? Doesn't text anything back. Shows up at the old hotel, drops it off at our door,

doesn't knock on the door, then sends me a text message saying your food's been gently placed by your door. So I open it up. It's somebody else's order. It's not my order. Oh no. It's not my food. It's a totally different set of food. It's all cold. It's somebody else's order. It's not my order. Oh no. It's not my food. It's a totally different set of food. It's all cold. It's all totally cold, like to the touch cold. Right. And then, so I'm like, I slammed down some really bad burger because I'm starving. My wife slams down some really cold fries because her meal wasn't even in there. And then I go to bed. Right. But I've picked a place close to the airport.

So it's like legitimately in the path of the takeoff. So as the planes take off, they are flying over my room. I got a nice view of the plane taking off. And that's fine. I started to get used to that. But around 4.30 a.m. or so, a plane came in for like a hard landing. And I swear to God, I thought they were going to hit the building. It was shaking the bed. I thought we were going to hit the building. It was shaking the bed.

I thought we were going to die. It was rough. So I didn't sleep so good that night. So it's really nice to be over here at Alex's. Maybe you would have been better with the red eye. Yeah, I know, right? The moral of the story is don't try to save money on a hotel room near the airport. We went for the cheapest.

It was $90 a night. It's not that cheap, but these days it is. You got to remember sleep is sleep is like a superpower. I know it really is. It was a touch and go there for a little bit. So it's been nice. Alex has made us up. It's like an Alex's bed and breakfast here, you know? So we got rooms, we got a kitchen. You know, we should charge 90 bucks a night on Airbnb. You could. I think, I feel like you could, actually. I mean, and you got the cute dog, so people are going to want to stay. That's true. Oh, yeah, yeah.

With Airbnb, it would be a dog fee, $9,000. Right. Now, I know, so my, like, a lot of my bumpiness was after the flight. Like, my flight and stuff, that all went smooth, obviously, because I'm not complaining about it. But, Brent, didn't you end up in some sort of weird like multi-flight situation? I know Wes did too so how was your trip in? Actually surprisingly usually I have a really great story to tell but this time it was really bland and boring

which I think is what you're looking for in terms of flights. So I the only thing that went wrong was I spilt my Thai food under my seat after they forced me to put my luggage up on the rack instead of down there so I was a little pad tied down. Yeah. Pad tied down. That's too bad. But other than that, it went quite well.

And Wes? I did take the red eye path this time. Just figuring, you know, I'd seen your flight and you were going to get in pretty late. I thought, okay, I'm still young enough, right? I can handle a red eye. I love it. It's about age. I sleep decently most of the time. I feel lucky in that regard. And yeah, that part of it went just fine. But, you know, as I land on the ground, I had a layover in JFK. As I land, kind of groggy, it's like five in the morning. I'm waking up. I, you know, reconnect to LTE and get my notifications.

Your flight has been canceled. I was like, wait, what? Which flight? Is it the flight of mud? No, that doesn't make sense. It's my next flight. I guess I'm in New York now. No, thankfully not. JetBlue had figured it out. So by the time, you know, by the time I'm off the plane, I didn't have to go talk to anyone. They'd already emailed me like an updated itinerary. The only catch was the, it added an extra flight. And the first step I had to do was go from JFK up to Boston, which is a 38 minute flight. Oh, that's such a weird flight. And the first stop I had to do was go from JFK up to Boston, which is a 38-minute

flight. Oh, that's such a weird flight. And because they were kind of having to reschedule things after the cancellation, of course, it was delayed. It took a while to get off. But we still arrived earlier than expected. So there was another plane already in our spot. So it was probably like an hour and a half or a two-hour affair from learning about it to actually getting to Boston for 40 minutes of airtime. Wow. A 40 minute flight. It feels like you're going to spend more time just getting on board, sitting on the tarmac and getting off. That was exactly. Yeah. We were on the, we had, we took Delta on the way out from Seattle and you sit down, right. And they're booting up all of the in seat displays and stuff. And I'm like, look, look, honey, this is Linux.

Isn't that cool? These displays all run Linux. Oh, yeah, that's neat. You know, that's cool. We're going on a Linux event. We're on a Linux airplane. Yeah, that's great. Then we're on the flight, and the thing is so dog slow.

It's like, so this is your Linux. This is great. Probably like a two-point-something kernel still. Yeah, oh, man. They're all doing like this weird shared display when they can. i'd be really curious how this works if anybody out there knows but like when you use the flight tracker all of the displays on the flight tracker screen are all updating at the same time they're all in sync so is it one video feed or are they actually running instances of that flight tracker that's you know whatever amount of seats that are running it and

somehow they still stay in sync. I don't know. But it was a two-core Linux system because it had two of the tuxes at the top of the screen. Very observant. I know, right? I love walking through the airport and, like, trying to observe, like, what devices people are using.

If they're using Bluetooth, if they're using an Apple product or an Android product. Saw a lot of laptops. A lot of people using laptops in the airport. Did you try any new tech on this trip? Hmm. No, but it is the first time I've used the Plex downloads feature since they've introduced the Plex Sync versus Plex downloads.

And I don't really see much difference. It's kind of wonky because it recreates the directory structure of your online server. So because I pulled it down from two different servers, I had two different libraries I had to manage instead of just all my downloaded videos. But it worked nice. We got the new season of The Expanse

and also Enterprise season one. And the nice thing is you can just say, just sync down the stuff I haven't watched yet. That's killer. And now the thing will be is how well does it do syncing back what we watched? So then when I go back to my Are you starting fresh? We'll see.

We'll see. But that was nice. But I think that was the only new tech. Did either one of you guys do anything new tech wise for this trip? Oh, you did. Yeah. I picked up some of those Sony noise canceling headphones. And I haven't really had a good pair of active noise canceling headphones before.

So that was sort of my trial run on the flight this time. And it was nice. I think especially because I was taking a red eye, you know, just let me tune things out. That extra flight from Boston to it started off. I was right at the very back, like the last row of the plane. There was a pretty loud mechanical noise, like until it really got to cruising speed. So that was handy. And thankfully, I hadn't really even this sort of a last minute like, oh, yeah, I'm flying.

I really need some new headphones. Let's just get it. Pull the trigger. Hadn't tested it, but it works beautifully with pipe wire ah that's great you do any new tech for you brand or did you have it all dialed in i tend to not want to try new things because you know if it's going to fail as it'll be when you need it look at this guy the reasonable one over here i was tempted to move to a new phone as know, my sort of tried and true phone is about to explode. The battery is about twice the thickness that it should be.

Legitimately. I keep telling them it's a fire hazard. This thing is definitely a fire hazard. So about like three days before the trip, I thought, oh, I got to change. I can't bring this thing. This is just a hazard to everybody. But I never got there because the other phone I was going to switch to doesn't have an audio jack.

Oh, the audio headphone jack. Yeah, I got one of those little dongles, but it was a cheap one from the grocery store because it was the day before I was leaving, so I couldn't order anything reasonable. And it sounded awful, so I didn't even bring it. Well, you know, when you've got a phone where the battery is growing outside

the case where it's popped the back of the case off, I'd probably say the best thing to do would be taking it up on an airplane. That's probably, I like that his, you know, audio snobbery too, is he's willing to put his own personal self at risk just for that. Cause you know, you put it in your pocket, right? You know, what's near your pocket, right? Like, it's nice and warm. I like it. Oh man. I guess as long as it's keeping you comfortable. Well, we have a lot to talk about today. We had a hell of a meetup yesterday, and I tried to talk to people about what Linux stuff they're doing, what's not working for them with Linux, what is working for them, what distros they're using. And we tried to get a flavor of who's out there.

And I think we did a pretty decent job. You know, we always kind of evolve every meetup and try to learn and adapt. But before we get started today, I have kind of a special announcement I want to start the show with because I'm very excited about this. And you guys know that we've been talking about the future of podcasting in general and JB shows in particular. And you know about how particular we are and how careful we are with the sponsors we pick. And so I'm super excited to welcome Bitwarden on board for Linux Unplugged. They're on board for a little bit and round of applause, right? Because we're all Bitwarden on board for Linux Unplugged. They're on board for a little bit. And round of applause, right?

Because we're all Bitwarden users in here. Yeah, we are. And I think it's just an absolute great sponsor. Now, I'm not sure the landing page is live yet. So the background here is Bitwarden has really made an effort to support independent Linux content. And so this is all kind of getting set up right now. So bitwarden.com slash Linux is going to be the landing page. If it's not live when you hear this, let them know maybe via support or some other way that that's how you heard about it.

Because I'd love for them to stick around for a bit because I think this is a great sponsor for the show. So it's bitwarden.com slash Linux. And you go there, you get started with a free trial for a team or enterprise account or for your personal account for an individual user as well. And it really is, Bitwarden is just the easiest way for businesses and individuals to store, share, and sync sensitive data. And it's not just passwords, although that's the primary use case I think a lot of us have for it, but you can also store your two-factor authentication tokens in there, things like recovery passwords for maybe like Element, and maybe your Bitwarden certificate is what I realized I should be putting in there. Things like recovery passwords for maybe like element and maybe your Bitwarden certificate is what I realized I should be putting in there. I use it to store secure notes. So I have like WireGuard configs in there too. Ah, that's a good idea. Yeah. The attachments feature

is pretty darn convenient. Yeah. I like the idea of putting my WireGuard config in there. Yeah. So it's more than just passwords really, but that is what's great. And like the support for two-factor authentication is so nice because if you use it on mobile, it really streamlines the whole process of good passwords on mobile. And I think that is really key. The other thing they have now is account switching support. How great is this? So it's super easy to switch between your personal and a business account, or maybe a personal account and open source project that you're working with. And one of the things that's given me confidence to use Bitwarden is that I know they have a self-hosted option available if I want it.

I can get that up and running if I need to. I prefer to just get things up and going really fast with Bitwarden Cloud. I trust the security they have around that, and it just got me going immediately and made it super easy to share stuff. And the other nice thing is either route, they have a very large and active community in both their forums and on Reddit and really everywhere online. Bitwarden just has millions of users. So you get a lot of community support if that's the kind of route you prefer to go. A couple of years into using Bitwarden, I think what I've really learned to appreciate is how simple it makes bringing on team members. Like Alex, you have a way where you use it, where you don't share all of your passwords with somebody. You just share a few of your passwords. That's right. Yeah. So my wife and I,

I created a, an organization and let's say there's a password to log into daycare to pay the daycare bill or something like that. We can both share that password as part of the KTZ organization that I've created in my Bitwarden kind of universe. And we both have access to those passwords, but it's on a need to know basis. Yeah, I like that. That's really nice. And I've been able to do that with team members when they come on or just like somebody who's working on a project for us. And it is made just keeping really good passwords and safe passwords, straightforward and simple. And I think we all probably know this, but it's a good reminder that just a good password and good password hygiene is one of the few things you can really do

to notably improve your online account security and your safety. You probably already knew that, but maybe somebody in your life needs to hear that. So send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go try it for yourself, for your business, and you'll support the show. It's a great way to get started if you're an enterprise or if you're an individual user. You can go there and get a free trial at bitwarden.com slash Linux, and it's free for an individual user. You may find you don't need the cloud service.

I added it for the two-factor support alone, but there's a lot you can get out of Bitwarden. Just go try it. Go see it for yourself. It's bitwarden.com slash Linux. And a big welcome aboard to Bitwarden for joining us on the show. It's just super, super great to get support like that, especially right now. And you can support the show by visiting bitwarden.com slash Linux.

All right, let's talk about our meetup. I feel like there's a lot to talk about. It's an exciting time. I think we should, maybe we should start with like the behind the scenes moment. We did capture a little bit of like the sitting down at the kitchen table and us having a conversation before we left to the event to go like pick up food and do all the things we had to do before the event started. So I'll take you back to, you know, like two hours before showtime. We're sitting in Alex's kitchen. It's about 15 minutes before we got to leave for the meetup.

Saturday morning on April 9th. We've been here for a couple of days. Yesterday was all about eating a lot of food. And today, it's not like we're nervous or anxious, but there's just so many things we still have to pull off in the next two hours. I think we're just anticipating. We're just ready to get this thing started. But also, super exciting that it's Wes's birthday today.

Happy birthday, Wes. Wes. Aw, thank you. I really can't imagine anything better than, I mean, being with the team in person. Happy birthday to you. With these amazing fools, I mean, what could really be better? And Alex's beautiful home, which he has been so gracious hosting us at. And yeah, you know, there's just been a lot of excitement and work to get here.

Alex scouting locations, actually being willing to host us and the community here in Raleigh. And then just the small details, things like rolling up t-shirts. Rolling up t-shirts seems to be like the key to a good event, doesn't it? Well, you've got to have all the little pieces in place so you're not distracted, and you can actually do the thing we're excited about, which is interacting with our amazing audience. Alex, how's it been having the whole crew in your house, basically? It's been a lot of fun.

Really, we're all just guests in Archie's house, my dog. But to celebrate Wes's birthday, Chrissy's iPhone just showed him a montage of past events. And 90% of the pictures were him and Wes recording audio. One of those pictures was a beer picture. So I think this afternoon at the brewery, perhaps we need to, we need to Hear, hear. We did do better. We did do better. I got a couple of ciders down the hatch. You got a beer, too.

Oh, yes, I did. So that worked out pretty good. And even the line at the brewery was helpful because it was a bit chilly yesterday, let's be honest. Yeah. And the brewery was nice and warm. Everybody was troopers because the standing temperature was like 55, 60 degrees. But then you bring in that 15, 20 mile per hour wind chill, and it was really cold. So after three or so hours, maybe three and a half, four hours, we actually got the whole crowd to migrate to the brewery. I think that was some excellent foresight on Alex's part to pick a spot that had an adjacent brewery.

Yeah, and a barbecue place. And there was all types. So let's dig into that a little bit at this event. I think we all got a chance to at least see the deck floating around. Listener Jeff brought his Steam Deck to the event. And, of course, I had to go hands-on. Yeah, I have a Steam Deck. I love it.

It's been a lot of fun. I love it for basically picking it up and being able to play, you know, five, ten minutes of a game and put it down and not have to worry about it. It's been a lot of fun. I love it for basically picking it up and being able to play, you know, five, ten minutes of a game and put it down and not have to worry about it. And have you tried anything else with it at all? Like poking around, exploring? No, I haven't had a whole lot of time to do that. I did have this whole thing where I was going to run Ansible and get everything figured out,

but with the immutable OS, apparently Flatpak packs the way to go, so I haven't exactly had a whole lot of time to play with it. I do have KDE Connect on it, so I can move things back and forth, but that's about it. It does look nice, new, and shiny. Do you want to show Chris how it works? Sure.

Alright, okay. Oh, we got a game going, too, already. Hades. Hades, and it looks good. Any tips or tricks for him? Kill the skeleton. I'm good at killing skeletons. But, you know, of course, the first thing I want to do is I want to get on the desktop. How do you get on the desktop?

A little trigger action? Yeah, so you got to go down to this one. Go down to power. A, yep, and then desktop mode. Aha, switch to desktop. All right, switching to desktop. I'm going to bust out the trackpads here. Oh, it's kind of almost doing like a whole new loading thing.

There we go. I got Plasma. That's fun. That was easy. Yeah. They got a return to gaming mode, and they got a virtual keyboard here. It felt pretty good in the hand, too. You know, it felt pretty solid.

What did you think weight-wise? Did you expect it to be heavier? I expected a denser, heavier thing. Yeah, me too. It was about as light as a... As a game, like a controller, like an Xbox controller. Yeah, like an Xbox controller. Like there wasn't a whole computer in there.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I think the size would be more of the limiting factor just for portability and really the weight. I thought the screen was great too. Like it was, we were in direct sun for a few little bits, you know, outside. That's where it's going to be at its worst. And it was, it was fine.

Yeah. Also, I mean, just, I think the speak store audience, he didn't quite get there, but I love the idea of running Ansible on your like gamepad. I know, I know. I know. He also brought a pretty tricked out electric car too that you got to ride in alex oh yeah yeah yeah so this uh this is fuzzy miss born on the self-hosted discord channel he uh he brought the hyundai ionic 5 hundy sorry for the americans uh this thing is a fully electric car and he just drove it down from pennsylvania so he was a bit worried about the charging situation getting into town and stuff like that no problem no problem at all that's

pretty slick and you got to go for a ride and that's pretty great yeah and he put this thing in sport mode and it pinned me back in my seat like to get a petrol car that would do that you'd have to spend a lot of money yeah i mean we didn't really get like a super official account because we didn't have like a a door an entrance where we had somebody counting and clicking no we were just in a in a lovely park where people were coming at us from from every angle but we did buy 90 name tags and they all disappeared yeah so i think you know over the course of the afternoon about 100 people showed i think so i think we about about exactly we asked if you were going to go please try to sign up for the meetup

and people did it like it was great and it helped us plan for that i please try to sign up for the meetup. And people did it. Like, it was great. And it helped us plan for that. I didn't sign up for the meetup. I'm sorry. Brent! Sorry. Somehow he snuck in anyway. Yes. Who led that guy?

Party Grasher. So we, I don't know really how to describe it without saying we just had all types there. I mean, when I say that, I mean people who were longtime Linux users, people who are brand new users to Linux, people who were 11 years old, people who were 70 new users to Linux, people who were 11 years old, people who were 70 years old. Like the whole range was there. And one of the interesting couples that were there was Jason and Kelly,

and they had come from Virginia. So here we are at the meetup. Tell us your names and where you came from. I'm Jason. I'm Kelly. And we came from Alexandria, Virginia. And for someone like me who has no idea how far that is, how long would you have drove? It was a really long journey. No, it's just about a four-hour drive without traffic. It's not bad at all. And we actually have family

in the Raleigh area, so we were able to see them multitask and come here. Yeah, she graciously agreed to come with me to my Linux Nerdfest meetup. And what does the Nerdfest feel like for you? Is it, like, very inviting? Oh, you know, I feel right at home here. I have, like, very nerdy brothers. I have my own brand

of nerdiness, like Star Wars, fantasy, and sci-fi related, but... But not necessarily IT related, but yeah, so so no, it's great. Cool. And how's the meetup for you? Is this the first time you go to something like this? This is the first time I've been to anything quite like this.

Closest I think before would be something like MAGFest, which is like a music and gaming festival years and years ago because it's in the area that we live in. But yeah, no, it's great. It's so nice to finally put names to faces from all the voices you hear on this and meet everybody. Yeah, Jason and Kelly were really great. And I would say that is true of most people. But Jason was, I don't know, he stood out for me.

He told me that he worked at the Department of Defense in the office of the Inspector General. I don't even, it sounds really interesting. I don't know exactly what that is. But he was the kind of person, and I saw this repeatedly, you guys might agree with me, is that he was just like insatiably curious about all the technologies that he could get his hands on. And so for instance, he said he learned Ansible recently, which came up a lot. And he said it just changed his world, but also really made a really nice stride in his, in his career. Uh, he said that took him to a whole new level. So I thought that was really interesting. He said, um, the department of defense where he is runs all their stuff on Red Hat 7.9, which is interesting. He was a little nervous about that.

Yeah, he was. So I thought that was funny. But he also said he works with a whole lot of data scientists on some data analytics stuff, which sounded fascinating. I love that there's Linux users everywhere. So great. Right? This kind of lets us get a real sense of just every weird little niche

that Linux has found itself over the years, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's also those moments where you meet people that you either click with right away or you share something in common with. And we have those kinds of moments. Of course, when you're named Chris, you always meet another Chris at these events. But Brent, you had a chance to meet another Brent. My name is Arturo, and I drove here from Roanoke, Virginia. So I had a six-hour drive yesterday and a three-plus-hour drive today.

Nice. How about you? I think we have something in common. Yeah, we do. Actually, I didn't have to drive that far. It was all the way on the other side, actually over by the airport. Did you fly into RDU? Yep.

Yep. So that was my drive in. Nice. And my name is Brent. And my name is Brent. And you didn't have a name tag, did you? No, I didn't have a name tag, but I found another guy named Brent and it was good enough that he was able to share. So they worked out pretty well. I happened to put two layers on and I put a name tag on each layer and I was able to donate my name tag, which I think is the first time that ever happens. The Brents were so inseparable. I mean, it was adorable. They were great.

Well, you don't find them that often. So they're all great people, I got to say. Now, if you're wondering, why did Brent have two name tags? I'll tell you why, listener. Because Brent is a damn pro. That's why. Because Brent had multiple layers of clothing and had a name tag for each layer of clothing so that way he could remove his jacket and he would still have his name tag on. Not my first event. Come on, gentlemen. Say nothing else about Brent.

He's easily identifiable. It reminds me of, there's an episode of TNG, Star Trek TNG. I don't know if it's Picard or who, but somebody takes their jacket off, their uniform, where they have their comm badge. They take their jacket off, and there's a comm badge on underneath. That was Brent. That was Brent.

You know, the thing, too, that's really nice. So you get people that they deal with Linux users, and they deal with Linux and other admins all day, every day. That's totally their thing. That's the world they live in, right? thing. That's the world they live in, right? But then you also have people that are listening to this show, or maybe they're participating in the mumble room, or they come to these meetups because it's the only place they hear anyone else talking about Linux. Yeah. So the strange thing is I actually don't, aside from, you know, we have a lovely gathering here. I don't actually know anybody else who runs Linux. Yeah, no, I am a chemist in a factory.

So I do industrial chemistry. It's got nothing to do with Linux, although there are some mighty fun apps for it. But it's always just been kind of a thing I've been interested in. The local group is the Trilug. They're pretty good folks. So kind of fell in with them a little bit. And here we are. I heard you guys were coming all the way over here. I couldn't not make the 20 mile drive over. We have a good crowd here, like a really good crowd. I mean, people came from New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia and Florida too, but a lot of locals here in Raleigh. Yeah, I was impressed. I mean, Alex, you've got a good crew.

Yeah. Home of the Red Hat. I mean, it's perhaps not too surprising. Red Hat, there's a, what's the other largest tech company here too? I don't think they're as big as Red Hat. There's all sorts. So Raleigh is actually a conglomerate of three different cities.

We call it the triangle. There's Raleigh, there's Durham, and there's Chapel Hill. And in the middle of these things is about where the airport is. And just over the road from the airport, pretty much by your crappy hotel, is RTP, Research Triangle Park.

And in there, you've got IBM, Microsoft, you've got Pfizer. There's dozens of big pharma things in there. Lots of big tech, too. Yeah, some other tech companies as well. Yeah, so, I mean, it makes sense in retrospect. It makes a lot of sense in retrospect. I feel like, though, we had such a good turnout.

And that was, you know, also what has taught me is, like, the first one you do is when you get the smallest turnout. And if you do another one, you get an even larger turnout. And so we're already talking about like, how are we going to do this on a yearly basis now? Because this was awesome. You know, coming out here to see the people on the East Coast. Clearly, we've been neglecting a very serious audience base. I agree.

And we can get a nice cadence going. If we have LinuxFest Northwest in the spring in Seattle on the West Coast, and then something on the East Coast in the fall, maybe and denver every now and then to sprinkle it in and then and the other thing of course don't worry across the pond if you're listening thinking what about over here what about alex is already campaigning he's working the room i'm working i'm lobbying so it's gonna happen but um every now and then you run into somebody and i i think sometimes they have like a message they want to relay to us like they they've been listening to the show, and there's something they want us to consider. All right.

Hi, I'm Lane Fu. In my day job, I'm a cloud and DevOps consultant. At night, I am deeply involved in the Armbian project. I've been involved for several years working either with CI or just advocating, liaising between Eastern European folks and native English speakers and mostly just fighting the good fight to let everybody know that there's a lot of stuff out there besides raspberry pie on ARM. I take that one personally.

I feel like he's dragging that comment to me. Yes, Lane, I realize. And ARM being is a great project. We should probably do more work around that. Yeah, I think it just means that, you know, if you ever want to try some more interesting boards out there, other types of little tiny projects, you've got a support system out there. People like Lane Fu are working hard to make it run decently on other things besides the Raspberry Pi. And they're just like, pay attention, would you? We're working really hard to do this.

Message received. We'll consider. We will consider. See, you come out to these events, you get us to think about these things. A lot of Python and Ansible love at the meetup. And how about you? My name is Sam. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. I'm a Python programmer. That's my day job. I was an Ansible core maintainer for about five years. So longtime Linux user. Just love everything about Linux, open source, and automation in Python. That's basically my wheelhouse. Sam's all about it. And he had a lot to say.

And the thing is, is a lot of people had good things to say about Python and about Ansible. And Nix, there was some Nix love as well. There was also some Nix shame. There was some Nick's love as well. There was also some Nick's shame. Dusty came out and he made, Dusty made a hard pitch for trying out the Fedora Core stuff, right? The Core OS stuff. Like, I think we got to give that a fair shot too.

It's only fair. I mean, you come to a meetup. Dusty made a good case. So Dusty said, you know, automatic updates. I know how you like that. But also they have like these tracks you can subscribe to. And like one of them is a testing channel that you can subscribe to. And you'll get your, I think you said a week or two weeks.

You get like two weeks heads up of all changes. So you throw one machine in this testing channel and you get a good solid week heads up of changes because they're all automatic updates. You see where it goes. And if that system doesn't break, then your production system is going to be okay. But hey, who are you kidding? We're going to run testing on all our production machines. Sure. Yeah, I'll believe that when it happens. So the nice thing about CoreOS in particular

is how it boots from one image or partition at a time. So you can update the image you're not booted into currently whilst you're booted into the previous one. Then you reboot into the new image. And if that's broken somehow you just fall back to the old image like a kernel in grub yeah yeah that does sound good and that also sounds uh consumer friendly for like a device you could see where you could build in a system where if the user is like power cycling or something there's a little bit of logic that just says

use the last image well i mean isn't that some of the stuff uh that valve have had to kind of invent for the way they're deploying arch on stuff that Valve have had to kind of invent for the way they're deploying Arch on the Steam Deck? Yeah, I actually kind of wonder. I mean, I know we're hyped right now. And I'm saying this before we've gotten our hands on SteamOS 3. Acknowledged and kind of wish we had already seen this SteamOS 3 stuff. But wouldn't it be interesting if in like five years we look back at this and go,

Valve was on the right path, but they just totally implemented like their own thing when they could have used something like Nix or something like CoreOS or, you know, anything that uses OS tree. I wonder if we'll feel like good idea, bad implementation, kind of like Munich. When Munich first did their own thing, we were like, oh man, a whole state is switching to Linuxux and then we found out like their own custom distribution thing and they spent like six seven years flailing around trying to make that work and the whole time we were all just going why didn't you just use ubuntu right like maybe that's what's happening right now with the deck but we're too early in the in the cycle we're

all too hyped right now to realize it so you're saying just just skip steam os 3.0 until 4.0. That'll be the good one. Maybe. Then again, maybe Linus was right. Maybe Valve is going to start with SteamOS 3, and they're going to build a consumer product that is following some of these best practices, and it ends up being the leading, largest desktop use of this kind of technology. Linus said that it was going to be Valve that brought Linux to the desktop masses.

So maybe this is the start of it. And so maybe we'll look back at it and think they were geniuses. Does this mean, does this mean that this is the year of the Linux desktop? You know, I was seeing a conversation about this online recently, and I'm curious to know what you guys think. But the basic premise is like that whole concept of the Linux, the year of Linux desktop is harmful because it creates this set of expectations. And the reality is that it's a slow march and that it becomes the year of Linux desktop for each one of us individually. And by having like this idea, we like are doing the whole movement harm and not recognizing the actual successes we're seeing.

What do you think of that idea? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think there's probably a lot of truth in that. But partially I also think, does anyone take the year of the Linux desktop seriously anymore anyway? No, it's a total joke, right? I think everyone might already recognize that already. I think we do. I think the Linux community realizes it's a meme at this point. But I also hear people outside the Linux community still throw it in our face as like, oh yeah,

how's that year of the Linux desktop coming? It's a very valid point. I think my year of the Linux desktop was about five or six, seven years ago when I was first getting into Linux. And since then, it's become a tool I use to do various tasks. Right. And kind of assuming that there's like this minimum benchmark it must meet, it's not really how computers work, is it? Because, you know, Windows and Mac aren't great for everybody either. It also sort of tries to assume an audience or a certain scale that tries to say, like, that's what makes it matter when, you know, especially these days with the

relevance of desktops in general, it doesn't seem like maybe it's the right concept. Yeah, you don't really want to be the winner of the thing that's kind of already on the out. You know, I mean, I'm going to use a desktop for as long as I can. I'm not saying it's gone forever, but let's look at the sales numbers. It sort of tells its own story. So we also had a special moment here. In fact, I was, I honestly, I wouldn't have been offended or surprised if you said, sorry, guys, I'm talking to Wes. Sorry, guys, I'm not going to be able to make it to this event. I got stuff going on because it was Wes's birthday. So we wanted to make it special since, you know, Wes decided to spend his birthday with us. We wanted to acknowledge that at the meetup and Alex,

like a pro, sees the moment. Wes, come here. Chris, come up here too. All right. It's not my birthday. Thank you all for coming so much. Oh, yes. JP fam, thank you.

This is really, really cool. I think we're all here pretty much. I think people are coming, but. This was yes. JB fam, thank you. This is really, really cool. I think we're all here, pretty much. I think people are coming, but... This was a completely unplanned, accidental thing, but today is Wes's birthday. Yay! Happy birthday, Wes.

I didn't know till yesterday. So, we've bought him a birthday cake. You're all welcome to have some. There's one proviso. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Handsome. Happy birthday, dear Wes. Happy birthday to you. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you, everyone. All right, there's a cake. You have to come cut it. Yeah, there is cake.

Let's go. There was way too much cake cake what do we do with all that cake We've still got half the damn thing in my kitchen Both of them Yes I think we'll be packing on the pounds this trip Yeah but thank you for spending your birthday with us Wes I can't imagine anything better Aw jeez aw jeez that was pretty nice though And everybody just was totally

Immediately in on it. Like, there was no convincing. The whole crowd just immediately got in on it. It was great. Which I was very relieved of because my singing voice is not the best.

No. If it was just you and I up there singing, it would have been very embarrassing. That's what stands out so much about these meetups. You know, it's like,

it's total strangers. We've never seen 90% of these people. Some of you, unfortunately, we may never see again. But it's like an instant community. You know, it's like, it's total strangers. We've never seen 90% of these people. Some, some of you, unfortunately we may never see again, but it's like an instant community. You know, we know, we all know why we're there. We're there for the same reasons. We have the same interests and hobbies and generally the same philosophies. And so there's just like a, a weird and wonderful amount of implicit trust that just kind of happens. Yeah. Like a lot of the, um, basic social fabric exists because you can immediately

talk about, well, so how far away, you know, where'd you come from? Because everybody has that in common and you can talk about anything in Linux, anything you feel like talking about, you know, you want to talk about Wayland, go ahead. Like it's so much simpler from a social interaction standpoint. It is. And so what you see happen every single time we do these events is at first it's sort of about us and people kind of cluster around us. And then about an hour into it, everybody's talking to each other. Like people even who don't, maybe don't have great social skills. Maybe they don't interact with people a lot. Like, because we all have this in common and we all understand these terms. Like if somebody is out there talking about H top, people know what H top is like, how common is that? That's not very common in your real life.

My favorite thing was to come up to a bunch of complete strangers and just hear the word Tasmota. I'm like, Hey, we can talk about that. That's fun. Let's go. Right. I was impressed with some of the audience members just being so kind and generous too. You know, we had people offering to show other folks around or the number of times I saw someone, you know, they were kind of standing outside the circle a little bit, maybe not sure where they wanted to go next. And people are just always offering, expanding the circle and welcome you right in. Yep. Very true. Then I also had a special moment. So we had Wes's moment and I had a special moment, which was totally unexpected. So Nixie, everybody else is probably familiar with Nixie. She's been in the Linux community forever, and now she's got a YouTube channel that she does a lot of security content on.

And they have, her and her crew, have this amazing 70s-era GMC RV. And if you're an RVer at all that has any kind of historical RV background, you know these GMCs were like peak RV. And I had a chance to actually see one of these that was in full operation. 20 years I've wanted to see one of these. 20 years? Really? Yeah. So this is actually how I got it. It was actually set up as a desk like this, and it was a...

Server rack. It was a server rack, yeah. It is a server rack. Yeah. And he had, like, closed-cir closed circuit TV systems that he could plug in and had monitors up here to monitor some sort of security thing. An RV with a server rack. How cool is this? I finally see a GMC and it's got a damn server rack in it. Yeah, where are you?

Why haven't you done this? I can't believe this. So this, I don't know if this rig, I don't know if they like pull up at clients and like hook up to the security system or what they were doing. But this thing was like a mobile RV security system. I'm imagining some ethernet you've like plumbed through on the outside and you just sort of plug it into the building. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty neat. Very cool rig. You guys should Google this thing, the GMC RV. They only made this. So it's the only one they ever made. So, you know, you're not going to have any problems finding it. And it is very special. And Nixie was talking a bit about that i mean i just think

it's really amazing how it handles oh yeah so it doesn't handle like a like a greyhound bus it handles more like like a limousine like a limousine baby yeah it is such a cool rig because it has the super low center of gravity and air suspension in the back and it has dually tires and it's just the whole thing is just so frigging awesome. Real treat for me. And also just like, I love that there's people in my audience who like show up at an event like this in their RV.

Right. That's amazing for me. So that was a good time. Beautiful rig. I think if the Jetsons designed an RV, that's the design language that we had here. This thing was just so cool yeah chris how did you describe it you said it was like retro future yeah it is is that a weird is that but that's

a thing like it's like future retro so it it uh it is also retro but it is also kind of how we're designing things now well yeah you know it was the idea from the past of what the future could be in a direction we unfortunately haven't quite taken because i as you also said like that thing had a very star trek shuttle pod feel there's this curved glass in the cockpit sheen photon torpedoes they don't make them like that no more they don't they don't at that time they wanted to make it they wanted to build an rv where they followed what the airline builders follow so like when you're building a like a like a traveling a traveling jet, like a, you know, 747 or something like that, all the building policies and even down to the paint, the paint they chose was airplane paint. And so as a result, the paint, you know, it needs polished,

but the RVs paint still is on and holds up after all these years. And meanwhile, modern, modern RVs just disintegrate, you know, after 10, 15, 20 years. Oh, you know, something 10, 15, 20 years. Oh, you know something a little about that, huh? I know a little bit about that. And they also don't make it out of corn wire. So that also is a very good thing. I also thought the suspension system was like a whole weird, brand new, crazy thing. Like the wheels were able to turn independently a little bit.

Just a little. turn slightly a little bit, just a little, and sounded like both sides of the rear suspension worked in concert so that, you know, let's say, unfortunately you were driving into Denver, for instance, and you found a large bump in the road, maybe a pothole on one side and you hit that. They were explaining how that would actually only shift the suspension by about half of that distance because each side can independently kind of absorb that and kind of cantilever back and forth. It was really fascinating. I would say if that sounds interesting in any way, go check this thing out. I'm sure there are lots of videos of people explaining the suspension.

It was really neat. I'm just picturing one day I pick one of these things up and I build a mobile studio. Come on. In a GMC from the 70s, how cool would that be? You'd have to store it here, though. Totally, dude. Yeah, we'd probably have to build it here. Let's be honest.

If you inspire us like that, I think we might all need one. Because, what, we can't all record in yours. The sound isolation's just not going to be good enough. Yeah, that's true. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and you go there to support the show. I mean, let's just be honest about it, right?

Linode.com slash unplugged. Linode is fast, reliable cloud hosting. If you've got something you want for your next project, something you want to deploy up in the public, I'd be embarrassed not to put it on Linode, and I legitimately mean that. It's not just that it's super fast and has great performance, but if anything goes wrong, they also have fantastic support. I pinged their support recently. So I have a recent story to share with you because I decided to go full baller on our

matrix server before we left. I didn't want to be over here and have the matrix server fall down. server before we left. I didn't want to be over here and have the matrix server fall down. So I pinged Linode and I'm like, Hey guys, how's it going? Um, so, you know, I, I know how I have this $15 a month Linode here. Um, here's what I want to do. And I kind of just ran them through what I'm thinking about. And they sent me back a kind of response and gave us a few ideas and gave us the green light. So I turned this thing up to 11, our matrix box, we went from 16 gigs of RAM. We now have 96 gigs of RAM. We now have 96 gigs of RAM in that thing. We went from six CPU cores to 48 CPU cores.

We now have 48 CPU cores. Going to need a lot of workers. My God. Yeah. We are cooking with gas on our matrix server now. It is so slick. It's not the final solution, but you know what? When you can throw hardware at it, why not? And isn't this like the nice flexibility I have as a business? Because the last thing I want is this thing crashing

while I'm on a trip. But you don't have to commit to some giant new server thing that we would have had to take a couple weeks to get provisioned and set up before we left, right? You can just do it now, and if we figure out a solution that means we need to scale back down later, that's easy to do too. Click of a button, click of a button. That's the thing is it resized an existing system we already had in production and it resized it in minutes. And now the box has like infinite power. So I love that kind of stuff. And it's just the sort of thing I could never do with a physical box or even some janky VM setup that I'm running on my machine. So if you're a performance hound, if you're a reliability hound, if you want to be in slim with good support, Linode is the way to go. They've got 11 data centers around the world.

You're going to find something near you or your customers. They've been doing this for nearly 19 years, and they just keep making it better and better and better. I love it. I think you're going to love it. I would suggest you try something. Go kick the tires and see it for yourself. That $100 means you can really try something and make your own decision. And trying it out supports the show. So go to linode.com slash unplugged.

Get that $100 on a new account and support the show. linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 on a new account and support the show. linode.com slash unplugged. We have a little bit of feedback this week. Raphael wrote in about NexOS. We've been getting a lot of those. And I thought it would be a great question to put to all of you since we're in the same room. They write, We're in the same room.

They write, My dream is to be able to access a mostly persistent, single version of my development environment on any machine in my local network. I do hobby app development on Flutter, which has a relatively complex install procedure in Linux. Rarely do I get enough time between dad duties to update, run Git pull, and do a system update if I haven't used a particular laptop in a while. What I'd like to do is somehow host a persistent configuration of my workflow and OS that's always up to date and ready to work on my development project with minimal interruptions such as the changes from one system to the other. He says he has a small home server that might be useful in the mix. And he wondered, is this possible with Nix? Or are there any other solutions?

You know, Nix does have a fair amount of facilities for setting up a development environment. And if you're using something like Vim and Emacs, I know they've got a lot of support for including configuration for those types of editors in there as well. I think if Nix is the right fit, it might depend on, well, one, if you like using Nix, but then two, kind of what tools you're using for development and how well that fits think if Nix is the right fit might depend on well, one, if you like using Nix,

but then to kind of what tools you're using for development and how well that fits in the next ecosystem, because some, you know, some ecosystems, I think Go is pretty well supported NPM, there's some new exciting stuff for Clojure, I just happened to notice those work well. But there's other ecosystems, I think Ruby, sometimes can be painful from what I've heard that just, you know, maybe fewer of those packages have made it into the next package store. So those are the things I would check out. But there might be a lot of ways to skin this cat, you know, containers can be a nice way to set up development environments. Or if it's just on your local network, I know you guys really love the remote VS code setup over SSH. So maybe you don't need to copy the environment everywhere. And you can kind of have one master install that's able to reach out to the other systems. Hmm. That's a good idea. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. If that's truly

what you're looking for, you probably could get a minimum viable version with that. You know, I was thinking you could solve this with WebTop with the container solution where you essentially, it's a, it's a Docker container that creates a desktop Linux environment that you connect to over your web. It's like a self-hosted version of shells.com. Oh, very nice. So you could do something like WebTop. But you know, when I hear this, what I hear, I mean, maybe it's because I'm old, but I hear VM. I hear VM with free RDP server

running on it that you just RDP into. And now that GNOME 42 has exposed options to set up an RDP server, you can set up a Fedora workstation in a VM with free RDP server running, and then you can just RDP from any machine on your network. And honestly, I'd recommend using one of the higher-end RDP clients because if you use the actual Microsoft RDP client,

you get a pretty performant session. It's not bad with the new GNOME server. That's an option. I mean, I hear VM. I do get what he's trying to get at, right? Raphael wants to just sit down and get to work, right? It's like when I go to play a Steam game and I end up spending 15, 20 minutes

just getting my machine capable of playing that game. Less of a problem these days, but still happens sometimes. I get it. Raphael wants to just sit down and get to work. And I'm trying to think of what would be simpler and quicker than RDP. I mean, Alex, do you have any ideas of like, maybe is this another option?

Maybe just a dedicated laptop? I'm a big fan of the Westpain VS Code remote suggestion. I do that for a lot of my development actually. And I think perhaps the one thing that makes this more difficult is the Flutter element where you actually need some UI elements on screen. That potentially makes this more difficult because a lot of my development

is for infrastructure as code type stuff, more DevOps-y type things. So UI development, really, you need the environment locally. But if you can capture all of these requirements as to what makes your development environment yours and get that into an Ansible playbook, you should play the bell whenever I mention the word Ansible. Maybe a badger sound effect? We need an Ansible sound effect, guys. A quick stinger.

We do, yeah. Now, for me, if you can capture all that into a nice playbook, that then becomes your repeatable deployment thing that you sync between machines. And in fact, you don't even really need to sync the Ansible itself. You just commit that to a local Git repo, sync that between the machines, and then run Ansible against all of these machines whenever you sit down.

Have it as a cron job, if you like, to get more into that kind of GitOps kind of style of operation. Hmm. Yeah, that's a great idea. Greg Hellings also wrote in, onto our GitHub. I kind of grabbed this because I thought it was fascinating. This is the GitHub for the NixOS challenge that we set up. If you want to check that out, github.com slash jupyterbroadcasting.

And he writes, about four months ago for a day job, I began experimenting with the Nix package manager in order to enable developer tooling to run in Linux as well as macOS. Currently, we officially only support Mac OS. Having come here from Red Hat, this task was naturally assigned to me. Nix packages will allow us to eventually unify the same packaging system across Mac and Linux. He says, bonus, it also allows us to run

under the WSL2 on Windows. The same package manager in all three systems. I thought that was pretty brilliant. That is something I've been hearing a couple of times from people. Yeah, it's pretty nice. I've been trying out using Nix lately on my work Mac, and yeah, so far it's going pretty well. I've been impressed with the number of packages that are supported. It sounds like from talking with some of the folks on our Nix Matrix channel that the Darwin support, as they call it, has gotten a lot better just in

the past couple of years. So if you tried it before, it might be worth checking out. And it's really easy and light on the system. So if you just want an alternative, if you're already using something like Brew, I know before the show, we were kind of messing around and wanted a Brew package update one of our machines. Of course, that takes a while. And when you're trying to do a live stream, it's not great, but Nix is pretty fast and it's a nice alternative. Yeah, I actually feel like the time is right for the Nix packager to strike on macOS. I know it's been around for a while, but Brew has a lot of people that are not happy with it. And what is the new project that one of the Brew founders, I mean, it seems like there's some perhaps weakening in Brew's dominance

in macOS package management. I feel quite the opposite. I actually install everything on my Mac using Brew. So I install Chrome, Spotify, Mumbles. There's a package for literally everything in Brew these days, and that's where it really wins. And I have a question for you, Wes. I haven't done anything with the Nix package manager yet,

but I've heard this promise before with Terraform as the example, where you write one script or you define one configuration and then that becomes your golden configuration for all your things. Except for that, that's never true

because package names are actually slightly different on different OSs and stuff like that. Like, is that a solved problem with the nix package manager that's a good question i don't know if i'd say that it's quite solved and admittedly i'm kind of just starting off on this road myself um but i have been impressed with the flexibility of overrides um i haven't quite got it dialed in but one thing i was trying out was building cross-compiled docker images from mac without having to use any of the Docker tools,

but would spit out, you know, like a Linux container with all the right Linux binaries and stuff. And for the most part, that was just like one little change at the top of the file that was like, hey, here I want to pull in packages that run on the Mac side. So these are, you know, the native packages to run. And then for the stuff that's going inside the container, I want you to pull from the, you know, the x86 part of the Nix package cache.

Yeah. So I think that there's some problems. Now, of course, as you're right, like abstractions are leaky. I'm sure there are some edge cases that are going to bite you. But at least for the simple stuff, you know, like getting Htop and things like that going. Yeah, it's just kind of install it by name and go have fun. I feel like at the meetup, it was a pretty good mix of people who thought we were crazy for this Nix stuff people who were like right on board with us doing the challenge i feel like that's about the split in this room too and now as the french say it is time for the boost we got a bunch of boosts in

and for 5000 sats, BHH32 wrote, Thanks for the Fountain app recommendation. I've been listening to you guys for a few years now. I've never had an opportunity to attend a live show, and this is a great way for me to support you and participate. Here are 5,000 sats for you. Easily funded from my Exodus wallet, since it has its own Lightning wallet that I can deposit from my mining efforts.

And I mine exclusively on Linux. open source funding for open source shows. That's rad. Pretty crazy to think he's using open source software to mine something that generates value that he can then send in with a message to a podcast that talks about open source software using all open source self-hosted software on the back end for every single piece of it, right? Like you can't say that about a Visa transaction.

Not a Windows box in sight. No, no. Michael B. wrote in yesterday with 3,000 sats. Hey guys, I'm so glad that you're banging on things like Matrix to help us all getting all of this sorted out. Keep up the great work, Michael. You know, the Matrix community continues to grow, and I don't know if we really touched on this last week.

It was implicit in the conversation, but there was like a hot minute like three months ago where I'm like, screw this, I don't want to host this. Discord is way easier. Why am I bothering with this? And I was like, let's kill the Matrix server. Yeah, we really, I mean, we thought about it, but then all these damn bastards started joining the server and they're also great. I want to talk to them all. And now I'm all, I'm all in,

like, I'm like, we got to keep this thing. And also I think the other thing that's been sort of building over 2022 for me is I have really started taking a look at centralization in the Linux community and the negative effects. I look at centralization in the Linux community and the negative effects I think that centralization has brought Linux and Linux innovation. And then I started using that perspective to look at how we do messaging and look at how we communicate as a community. And I realized that there's value long-term in helping build the matrix ecosystem because of its decentralized nature. And that's sort of where I decided I'm going to double down on it. So that's why we now have a 48 core box with 96 gigs of RAM running our matrix server. Fingers crossed. We decided to go crazy. Well, Marcus boosted in with

10,000 sets. I hope these boosts and streaming sets help allow JB to grow. And hey, but by the way, Chris, I was the person that sent you a 3DS a few years ago. That was so awesome when Marcus did that. Thank you, Marcus. Because my son and I really got into some of the 3DS games for a little bit. And so we both had one and made for a nice moment. User 183 also sent in two days ago 12,000 sats. That seems impressive to me me great live stream last week

thanks for the 2 000 sats we were sending sats to people which i think they really enjoyed clearly yeah i guess they sent it back and then some now have btc on blue wallet and sats on fountain so here are yours returned and a few more if If you've not mentioned it before, worth highlighting FlatSeal, which among other settings allows confined Flatpak apps access to NFS shares and mounted partitions. Martin. Yeah, FlatSeal is a solid Flatpak companion. Just one of those things, you know, quality of life as you try to do more complicated workflows in your Flatpak apps. All right. So, Wes, I think you probably

found this one based on the functionality for our pick this week. It's called Bore. Yeah, a modern, simple TCP tunnel that's written in Rust. Yes! Yeah, you might wonder, okay, well, I wouldn't need this. Aren't there already things like ngrok? And yeah, they acknowledge that right in the readme it's similar to local tunnel and ngrok and there's a lot of tools for this but bore is intended to be a highly efficient unopinionated tool for forwarding tcp traffic that's simple to install simple to self-host with no frills attached and yeah it's true i was able to take a look it's less than 400 lines of safe asynchronous asynchronous Rust. So you can read through the code if you like. And because it's Rust, it's easy to get started.

You just run bore server on maybe a Linode system out there. And then you can use your own to forward reports. So if you're behind some firewall, you've got NAT in the mix. It's just really easy and simple. So let's say you're a guy who's maybe on a flight. And they're locking down what you can get to on this flight. Is there a way I could use this to get access to more things without pain? I mean, I'm not saying I'm doing that, but I'm asking for Brent. You know, that's a use case I hadn't considered. Could a

guy like do that with this or like, I'm trying to picture like what I would use this in the day to day. Well, I think it's just a nice way. Um, if you don't have a fancier setup or you don't want to invest in other like persistent tooling, you just need sort of an ephemeral port forward. That sounds like me. Yeah. Right. You haven't got your firewall configured. you don't want to invest in other like persistent tooling you just need sort of an ephemeral port forward that sounds like me yeah right you haven't got your firewall configured you don't even know how the firewall works who can bother so that's where this is really nice because one you can self-host it or they've they run a what seems like a pretty beefy beefy server on their own and so you just you know run this on your local machine tell it what ports you want to forward and then instead of having to set up a reverse proxy or open that port on your firewall it's done for you isn't it interesting how we talk about these picks sometimes and you dig into it you want to forward. And then instead of having to set up a reverse proxy or open that port on your firewall,

it's done for you. Isn't it interesting how we talk about these picks sometimes and you dig into it, you discover like the open source project is also running a server component to help make it work better. Like you don't have to use it, but Magic Wormhole, Jitsi, Bore, the list goes on and on. Like there's like, it's very common these days to have that little kind of server side component. And so that's an aspect these days to have that little kind of server-side component. So that's an aspect you've got to take into consideration. Absolutely. Maybe, if you find it useful, you want to support those kinds of projects.

That's right. I think that's probably true. And we don't want them monetizing that aspect of it because that's not good for any of us. All right. You know, it's a shorter show today because we didn't have a mumble room. I mean, we're going to try to do something in the post show. So if you're a member at unpluggedcore.com or at jupiter.party, then you get to hear the post show and you're going to see if we get it to work or not.

And not to mention the rather not safe for work conversation we had today. This is why you show up live, folks. All the extra show. You can hear Chris rant and rave about technical setups. That's always fun. You know? You get the full perspective. Right.

Spectrum of emotions. I'm a little worried about that guy. You know, you can get that whole thing. That's always fun. You know? You get the full perspective. Right. The spectrum of emotions. I'm a little worried about that guy. You know, you can get that whole thing. That's always fun. Who doesn't want that? Right? So check that out. You can join us on Sundays. We do the show at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv.

We'd love to have you join our virtual lug because it's almost like, it's like 99% of the time, 99.5% of the time. It makes its way into the show. It's just when, you know, something gets broken, then it doesn't make it in here. But you can always watch live. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. All right.

That's it. That's our live show, all hanging out. Is this considered a living room? What is this considered, a bonus room? Officially, I think it's a bonus room. Yeah, the room above the garage. Yeah, hanging out in the bonus room. In this case, bonus means totally capable of recording a podcast. I think it's now a bonus room. Officially, I think it's a bonus room. Yeah, the room above the garage. Yeah, hanging out in the bonus room. In this case, bonus means totally capable of recording a podcast. I think it's now a podcast room. I don't think I've ever seen anybody look quite so comfortable

as Wes Payne, who's recording from My Lazy Boy today. Yeah, this is amazing. We really put it in the studio. That is a nice spot. Alright, thank you so much for tuning in. Keep the Linux rolling at linuxunplugged.com and linuxunplugged.com slash contact and send in your boost, get your message on the show, and get it in front of us. We read them all. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. See you back here next Sunday. All right, jbtitles.com. Let's go pick our title.

I like, like, the chat room's asking, like, what's the deal with the Russ love? Seriously, why does everybody love Russ so much? Yeah, maybe I got a little defensive there. Whoops. Does it feel like, I mean, besides the fact that we are getting some awesome applications and it's making people rethink stuff, I think in part it's just sort of a show defensive there. Whoops. Does it feel like, I mean, besides the fact that we are getting some awesome applications and it's making people

rethink stuff, I think in part it's just sort of a show trope. Wes Payne loves Rust. That's why we love Rust. Yeah, maybe a little bit. Plus, like,

we kind of get to pick up on some of the legitimate enthusiasm out there for, you know, devs who are just finding and falling in love with Rust. When's the last time

you've seen something like this? Where, like, a language like this wins the hearts and minds of developers like this? Michael Dominic would tell you Objective-C, but I don't know if I believe him.