LINUX Unplugged - 455: I run NixOS BTW

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

We've hit a bump in the road with the NixOS challenge, and share what it might not be great at. Plus, what we didn't cover in our Ubuntu 22.04 review. The one where we don't talk about Ubuntu 22.04 at all. Open a channel to our Lightning Node: 037d284d2d7e6cec7623adbe600450a73b42fb90800989f05a862464b05408df39 Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Martin Wimpress.

Now, before we start, we have a listener in the virtual lug who's joined us in the metaverse. Is it the metaverse that you're in right now? Where are you? Not quite. I'm just apparently hovering above the ground in Oculus Home. But you got T-MUX. Yes, I have Turmux on one side and I've got Mumla in the middle. Turmux. So to explain this, what is this that you're seeing? Is this some sort of, how are you doing this? If you've ever used a Quest 2 and you've opened the store, it's up in that little window down at the bottom, and you can set it on each side.

You can have multiple windows. It's pretty neat. So on my right, I've got my settings panel. In the middle, I've got basically just a standard window with a model in it. And then on my left, I've got Termux. And these are floating in like a virtual lounge or something? Yes, I'm just in the little, you know, cabin in the woods studio and they're just floating midair.

How many NFTs did you have to trade in to experience this view of the internet? None other than just, you know, friend Facebook to give me ADB access. Just your soul to Facebook. That's all you have to trade. They had it anyway. But you know what? It's pretty cool.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux Talk Show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, I have hit my first major snag in the NYX OS Challenge. Oh, no.

We'll check in with the other boys and see how their NYX OS Challenge is going. Plus, we've got a fair amount of follow-up on 2204 and a look at the mate flavor of 2204. Then we'll round out the show with some great booze, some pics, and more. So before I go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room! Hello, JB1. And for extra fun today,

listener Eric is joining us in studio. He's here for the Virtual Linux Fest. Hello, Eric. Hi, guys. Hey. Hey there. Thanks for joining us. So, you know, we have a few things to talk about today on the show. There's like a whole lot to cover. Brent, you're still over at Alex's place doing projects. I'm sitting in his desk chair right now.

I think at this point you've proved too useful to be allowed to leave, right? That's true. These handcuffs are starting to get a little uncomfortable. I knew we should have checked on them. Rescue me? The other problem is, is that those wood handcuffs gives you slivers. Not that I would know, but I'm just saying they give you the slivers. It's true. And Wes, today you brought steaks to the studio. So we're gonna do a little barbecue and after the show. Yes. On a beautiful Pacific Northwest day like this, I think we have to. A little grilling, really. Let's be honest. I brought some chicken. So we've got some marinated chicken. We've got some steaks. It's going to be a hell of

an after party after the show today. And I've launched a new show this week. Pretty excited about that. OfficeHours.hair if you want to check that out. I'm going to do another live stream on Tuesday, this coming Tuesday as we release this. We'll be doing some sack giveaways to help people charge up their wallets for the podcasting 2.0 boosts. What time are you doing that? Noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, West Payne. You know what I want to do after today, too, is I want to sit down and have a little record sesh with you and brent and alex and chat about our

jb summer project plans that we have oh so that kind of stuff i'm going to feature in office hours and i'll have the mumble room going too so if you got any questions for me pop in there and ask them personal matrix stuff uh i don't know jb stuff show stuff go ahead and put pop in there and ask them. Personal Matrix stuff, I don't know, JB stuff, show stuff, go ahead and put it in there, and we'd love to chat. Also, FYI, you got like a few days after this here podcast comes out to register at the JB Matrix server. After that, we're going to shut down registration for a while, and it doesn't mean you can't participate. You can go still create a free account at matrix.org. But if you want a matrix account with a Jupiter broadcasting.com domain,

you have got until let's say Wednesday, Wednesday of April, which would be the 27th, 2022. If you'd like to have an at Jupyter Broadcasting domain name for your Matrix account, sign up now, because after that, we're going to shut it down because of spammer problems while we re-engineer a few things.

We'll probably eventually open it up one day, maybe, but I'm not guaranteeing that. And we may not either. So if you want to get in while you still can, we have linuxunplugged.com slash matrix, and our Matrix server is colony.jupyterbroadcasting.com. Limited time only. That's going to go fast.

That's right. All right, so let's get into the Ubuntu 22.04 leftovers that we have. There's some really interesting things that landed in this release, and everybody's now finally gotten their hands on it that wants it in that first kind of early window. And I think this is the one where we're seeing a lot of the work land in GNOME 42 for the new dark style changes. And there is a post over at discourse.ubuntu.com that really digs into all of the changes they had to do and the different implementation details to get this working in 2204. And so if you're just interested in the kind of plumbing stuff, I want to put that in the show notes so you can check it out. the kind of plumbing stuff, I want to put that in the show notes so you can check it out.

But a couple of other things that are in this release that I think are worth mentioning that we didn't cover last week. And I think number one for us here on the show, because we've talked about that Mars copter, that Linux copter so much. Yeah, we have. Still going strong, by the way.

Still going strong. They just hit their one year anniversary. I sent Tim a congratulations email about it because they're super excited. It's so great. And, you know, one of the things that Tim told us to make Linux work on that helicopter on Mars is they had to patch the kernel for real time support. It's just something they absolutely need. And so 2204 LTS is actually offering a real time kernel beta that users can install. Designed to, quote, meet telco network transformation needs for 5G.

Hopefully it's also useful for our little Marscopter. Yeah. You know, maybe not surprising, but real-time kernel patches and the preempt RT stuff can actually be a little controversial in our community. Surprise, surprise. It's come a long way. It's kind of wild to see it get to this level

and, you know, finally reach some real integration, some ongoing maintenance, more widespread use, perhaps. It was a topic that was discussed within Canonical for many years prior to, you know, actually shipping as a thing. What was the big holdup, Wimpy? The fact that there's a large misconception

in the wider world as to what real time actually means, what the definition of real time means. And, you know, an oversimplistic summary of that is real time does not mean now. It means within a reproducible latency window. That's what real-time actually means. You know, does it happen within a determinable window of latency? Right, you don't want those unbounded spikes that mean your machine didn't respond in time for some safety-critical feature, say.

Right, and, you know, lots of people have... I think there's a lot of placebo effect among enthusiasts that have been using real-time kernels in conjunction with things like Jack, for example, for audio processing. And when well implemented, a real-time kernel can play a role there for sure. But I think some of it was actually making sure that there were some measurable assurances around what a real-time kernel can deliver. Fair. I also wondered if perhaps we're seeing it land now just because in February, Intel acquired the folks behind the real-time preempt RT kernel patch stuff. Linutronics! Yeah, Linutronics.

And now it's an Intel outfit. Maybe Canonical already has a better relationship there. I mean, maybe that made things a little easier. Is that just wild speculation, you think, Wimpy? I've not been part of those discussions, so it would be wild speculation on my part. I got a real spicy Matrix message this morning that was quite upset

because the user had just finally made the leap to the 2204 LTS, and they discovered that the Firefox package has been replaced as a Snap now. And they also discovered that when they install certain things from the command line, even though they did an apt install for a dev package, they end up getting a Snap. And they were quite upset about this. And this is something that we've talked about before on the show. But just to

remind people that, yes, there are certain packages now that are snap packages in here. And that is not necessarily because Canonical just wants to make everything a snap. In the case of Firefox, this is something that Canonical and Mozilla had to work out at Mozilla's request. There's other things in here that are snaps that you wouldn't expect, like the UFW firewall is also a snap in 2204 which is pretty surprising but it makes you wonder if maybe that means they could update individual subcomponents of the ubuntu 2204 system without having to update all of the packages on the system so it'll be interesting to see where that goes but our buddy poppy has released unsnap which i will mention

on the show which is essentially a you know a fancy script to help you migrate from Snaps to something else. And I mention this because I think this is probably the way it's going to be for a while, is there's going to be more and more things that are Snaps just simply because that makes it simpler to maintain across multiple versions of Ubuntu. In some cases, it means it can be maintained directly by the software creator themselves. And for most users out there, the quote-unquote average users that are using Ubuntu, they're not really going to care much. But for the people that understand what a snap is or have an opinion, there's going to be community solutions like this unsnap script that Popey has created.

UFW is not exclusively a snap. It is available as a snap, but it's not shipped as a snap by default in Ubuntu 22.04 it's still a deb that's in the standard base system so okay I'm curious where that commentary comes from and yes poppy did make unsnap and if I may be so bold i i have a project called get deb which is apt get functionality for installing dev packages that reside outside of the open to app repository ecosystem i will paste a link to that it's's brand new. It's super fresh. I've only published it like a couple of days ago. But it means that you can install things, for example,

that only exist in GitHub releases pages, for example, and other third-party app repositories. So it's a very handy way to get software that is only available via DEBs from other means. Yeah, that's great. Because I imagine a lot of people that are moving away from snaps probably would prefer the DEBs. As far as UFW, I didn't mean to imply that it was the default way it's configured.

I just mean that there's a lot of components you wouldn't expect can actually be snaps. In fact, very core components of the OS can actually be snaps. And I think Mark Shuttleworth recently made comments about flat packs and snaps. And I think when you parse what Shuttleworth was saying, he's implying that snaps have functionality that flat packs do not have. And I think this is kind of one of the things he's talking about is these individual subcomponents

of the Ubuntu operating system or distribution can be replaced with snaps that traditionally flat packs I don't think could replace, which is an interesting idea, right? Because you could install the 2204 LTS and then have these individual subcomponents of the distribution updated independently of all of the other dev packages on the system, which I could see being compelling for some people that are into that. Yeah. And I think that's accurate. And that's been accurate for a couple of Ubuntu releases now that, you know, you can get applications as snaps. And they basically they're rolling applications on top of a stable Ubuntu base.

And that's been the case since, well, it was first introduced in 16.04, but it wasn't fully baked then, I think it's fair to say. But certainly by 18.04 it was. And that's a means by which, you know, you can get those applications. And I think, you know, Mark's comments about the security, particularly the security capabilities around snaps stands up like, you know, there are particularly that story resonates with IoT vendors. Yeah, if you have AppArmor, it stands up. I agree. Yeah.

Yeah, that's kind of the critical piece is the Snap security story is best with a system that is fully AppArmor compatible, right? And so that's a nuanced thing, really. I mean, I'm splitting hairs at that point. But, you know, the feedback I got this morning that kind of brought this whole conversation up was sort of the shock that there had been this transition to the snaps. And I think it really underscores that a huge majority of the Ubuntu user base is on these LTSs and they don't even bother with the interms. Because if they've been trying the interms, they would have known this was coming because we talked mean we talked about in our reviews of the interim releases and it's not even that they're not on the interims but they are not actively engaged in the news around ubuntu itself because otherwise they would have been well aware that this change was coming because it was made in the last release. And we did notice there's a couple of after-release things to adjust.

I think probably the most, well, important, not surprising. Surprising would be the wrong descriptor. But NVIDIA has requested the canonical rollback to using X.org rather than Wayland when the proprietary driver is loaded. So hybrid users are still fine. Intel users, AMD users, you're all getting Wayland. But if you have the proprietary NVIDIA driver, and that's your primary video card,

NVIDIA asked them to roll that back. Yeah. What is that about? You and I have been, Wes and I, have been following a lot of interesting NVIDIA Linux-related trends on Linux Action News. This almost feels like it's fitting into that. I mean, I don't buy that NVIDIA downloaded the beta and did some testing beyond maybe

a couple of people doing it. Maybe it happens. And if anybody was going to do it, it'd probably be NVIDIA. But most of these companies, most of these commercial companies, despite how much it would benefit them and how much hassle it would save them and how much user frustration it would save them, most of them can't be bothered to even begin the testing phase until sometimes multiple months after the primary release is out and so i find it odd that nvidia has made this request of canonical and i wonder if there isn't another shoe to drop like perhaps some other explanation for this is yet forthcoming we shall

see but that's a bit interesting. And also 3D acceleration for guests in VMs with GNOME boxes has been, and Vert Manager, has been disabled, which is a shame. That's a bit of a bummer. But it is what it is. And it really probably deserves to be tested on hardware anyways.

And, you know, when you've got an LTS coming out, I get it. Like, these things are going to perhaps stick around for a while. So you do want to be a little bit careful. Yeah, that point, I wonder if that's sort of commercially motivated, that there are solutions that, you know, provide those capabilities outside of open source solutions.

And, you know, NVIDIA may be supporting their partners in their endeavors on that. It is wild speculation. I do not know. It is wild speculation. I do not know. It is wild speculation. Wimpy bringing that proper British bacon to us. I love it. Tasty bacon. So let's talk about Ubuntu Mate Wimpy

because I'm running it right here on the live stream. I'm showing it to the people that are here live today. And this feels like a real refined release. The theming is just on absolute point. Of course, it's based on the 2204 base. This is like one of those, it feels like one of those Mate releases that you can install on a machine and just use it for three years. Yeah, well, thank you. That's kind of where I was headed with this and the rest of the team that have, you know, been supporting the development of Ubuntu Mate over the last two years.

But yes, you know, I consider myself now an intrinsic part of the Yaru team. I was first acquainted with them as a result of putting together, you know, a sprint when I worked at Canonical when I was leading the Ubuntu desktop team. sprint when I worked at Canonical when I was leading the Ubuntu desktop team and we sort of reinvigorated the significance of Yaru within the Ubuntu project and ever since then I've been you know a contributing member of that team and I've worked very hard to make sure that all of the good work they've been doing for Ubuntu and GNOME was reflected in Ubuntu Mate in this release. And so that's why there's a very firm commitment behind making the Yaru themes front and center in this release. So I've been thinking about loading this on my Pi 400 as sort of my standby, always ready workstation machine. And I'm wondering if with 2204, is it the case that we're refining the experience and we're eking more and more performance out of these types of devices? Or have we kind of hit the wall and it's going to be kind of the same as it was for the last couple of releases? What are your thoughts?

the same as it was for the last couple of releases. What are your thoughts? Again, my information is a little bit out of date, but I can tell you what I know of the relationship as was between the Raspberry Pi Foundation or specifically the Raspberry Pi Trading Organization and Canonical, which was Raspberry Pi Trading and their engineers were working towards supporting what we would consider the contemporary APIs in the Linux ecosystem for exposing GPUs, GPU acceleration and cameras.

Traditionally, those were exposed through proprietary APIs and wrappers and shims, and they've been moving ever closer to using the things that we recognize, Dry3, Video for Linux, and so on and so forth. seeing with this release is not just that relationship between Canonical and the Raspberry Pi Foundation bearing fruit, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation, you know, following through on their commitment to support those open standards. I like it though. It is nice to see it slowly, but steadily get better there. Absolutely. So we talked about the artwork, the AI generated wallpapers have been getting a lot of attention in our audience. That's what I've been seeing people talk about in our chat rooms. But I think also the significant thing in here is a pretty solid version of Mate itself, right? Yeah. It's interesting what's happening upstream in Mate desktop itself in that the last sort of two releases,

The last sort of two releases, and I can see this when I go and look in. So there's a service in Ubuntu called errors.ubuntu.com. You know, when you get those pop-ups that says something crashed, blah, blah, blah. Do you want to submit these results? That's where they go. And what I'm seeing is the good work that's happening in upstream marty desktop to find and resolve use after free bugs or memory leaks and things of that nature a number of those bugs you just see drop off a cliff as you move between like 1804 to where we are now. So yes, Marte desktop in of itself is now looking extremely robust.

And that's not to say the code base that we inherited when it was forked from GNOME 2 was in some way substandard. You need to remember that that code base was refactored from GTK2 to GTK3, and a whole bunch of different underlying technologies in order to, you know, keep it contemporary and up to date. And those initial ports were functional but maybe a little bit rough, and now we're seeing a refinement of that work. We sure are, and it is really noticeable just almost immediately when you fire it up.

So I also kind of want to talk about something that touches on a previous conversation we just had in the show. And I want to talk about this from a couple of angles, but it seems like you're cautiously setting up Ubuntu Mate to be a bit of Switzerland when it comes to packaging. If users want to use Debs, fine. If you want to use a Snap, fine. If you want to use a Flatpak, fine. And I feel like that part's a little bit new. Is that controversial for a flavor to do?

And could you just share some of your thoughts there? Yeah, sure. So I will say, I'll prefix this by saying, your friend of mine, Joe Ressington, I recorded a podcast with him and Adam earlier this week, which is out now called Linux Downtime. It's episode 45. And we dig into the whole, how do you make a distro? What is involved in making a distribution all about uh and we dig into that in more detail so that's definitely sort of you know homework for listeners to to go and have a listen to that but on that particular point um this wasn't my

individual decision to include flat pack support in Ubuntu Mate. In fact, I sent out a tweet earlier today from the Ubuntu Mate account, sort of poking fun at the very idea, but it came from the core team, the rest of the team that helped support and make Ubuntu Mate said to me some weeks ago, well, months ago, in fact, we should include Flatpak support in Ubuntu Mate. And my initial response was, well, I think that's going to be complicated. It's going to have all sorts of, you know, dependency collisions. I'm not sure that's viable. But when I actually looked into it, it was, as I said in the tweet earlier, it was super simple, barely an inconvenience. So, you know, steered by that impetus from the team around me, I implemented it. You know, I did the due diligence around it, made sure that that was a safe technical decision and we delivered that but that's kind of the expression

of Ubuntu Mate as what it's always been which is really Ubuntu Mate is a utilitarian distribution you know you can make it into the thing you want it to be. We don't want to overly constrain the options that are available to the people that use it. for our users was, you know, in keeping with that, you know, original goal of the project that we outlined eight or nine years ago. I like that way of thinking about it because it often was you'd turn to a flavor or a derivative that maybe wasn't an official flavor to get some of the things that maybe Canonical couldn't bundle, right? Maybe it used to be Codex or maybe it was even a kernel with CFS by default. And that's always been a role out there that these other distributions

have served for the audience that wants that. And you're right. It is just that only now instead of the MP3 codec, it's Flatpak. Right. And, you know, you need to understand that, you know, the Ubuntu project is made up of the the significant effort that canonical put into it and again this is something that i outline in linux downtime definitely have a listen but more so the different flavors of ubuntu We all agree that Ubuntu is a fantastic platform to develop on and innovate on. And where we respectfully disagree is how that Linux desktop experience, regardless of our differences of opinions about how we think that that should be done. And there's an enormous amount of crossover, you know, especially now, you know, you look at Ubuntu Mate and Xubuntu, there's a significant proportion of Ubuntu Mate that's delivered via the Zubuntu desktop. You look at Ubuntu Chilling, and again, a lot of the underpinnings of Ubuntu Chilling

come from Ubuntu Mate. And that kind of reciprocal collaboration exists throughout the flavors and it's not competition it's it's very much a collaborative you know feel that happens between the the developers and the development communities around those flavors leno.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 mean, that's really how this works, right? It lets you know, it lets the sponsor know that you heard about it here. So that's what the URL is for. It's linode.com slash unplugged,

and it's one we can enthusiastically endorse. Linode started in 2003 as one of the very first companies in cloud computing because they just saw what Linux could do, and then they built a business around that. 19 years later, they have the absolute best business in the space. They make cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible to all.

And they've just rolled out Ubuntu 22.04 support. So they have that up there now if you want to go try it out and play with it. Go create a system, Wes. That sounds like a great new server to play with. Absolutely. Right? And you get $100 to do it when you go to linode.com slash unplugged. You know, they also have all the other distros you probably want to try. It's pretty impressive,

actually. But I mean, now is the season of Ubuntu 22.04, right? So go experiment with one of their one-click deployments. You get an entire server in one stack or go build something up yourself. And if you ever get stuck, the audience tells me, I've never actually had to use the support as far as, oh, no, that's not true. Just once recently. That's right. I know it actually was a great experience. I had my first, after a couple, like two and a half years, I finally had like my first Linode support experience.

And it was as good as all of the audience is always telling me. Now, we use the heck out of things like their S3 compatible object storage, cloud firewalls, DDoS protection, and VLAN support for some fanciness that Wes Payne gets into every now and then. Most of the time, though, I'm just muddling my way through trying to keep the DNS working. And thankfully, they have a powerful DNS manager that lets you do all of that. And with pricing 30 to 50% cheaper than those major hyperscalers, they have these esoteric platforms and these crazy UIs where they just want to lock you in forever. Unlike them, they got great pricing and they'll scale for something you want for yourself.

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That's linode.com slashugged. Get $100 in 60-day credit on your new account and you support this here show. That's linode.com slash unplugged. All right. Now that we've talked about Ubuntu, we're going to talk about NixOS, which is actually Wimpy's fault. I think it was when Wimpy came on here weeks ago, a couple of months ago, and he's like, you got to look at NixOS. It's the future. You're welcome. And made me think about it again. Really, I respect your opinion, Wimpy.

When you say this is really something I'm noticing, I thought, you know, I've had a lot of people tell me it, but Wimpy's on here and he really sounds convinced. That's why you keep handing me that Mate ISO. I was wondering. I should have tried Nix packaging on Mate. If I wasn't making Ubuntu Mate, I'd be building a desktop around this NixOS. Really? A desktop? Oh, for sure. Yeah. Why? I think NixOS is the best expression of where

the Linux desktop and that intersection of the desktop and container technologies exist right now. I can see where you're coming from. I've been very impressed. However, I did hit my first like, oh, maybe Nix isn't the right choice for this snag. And I kind of, I'm a little demotivated and discouraged. I'll tell you guys about that. But Wes, I'm curious, I know you've been doing a lot of reading recently about Nix, kind of getting into the backstory about Nix. Like, where are you at right now with the challenge? Yeah, you know, I haven't switched everything over to Nix, let's say, but I have been, I've been having fun just kind of poking around the various places, because there's a lot to play with.

I was looking at, like, trying to understand where flakes are going to fit in a little bit better. I was also playing with Home Manager a little bit. And then I've also been poking around just in my dev side of my life. Like, well, yeah, because, you know, Nix is a build system, so where does it fit there? So I was playing with Poetry to Nix,

which Poetry is a cool new dependency manager for Python to help you set up and build and maintain Python projects. And because it's quite declarative itself, there's some neat wrappers that can help you just, like, take your Python project, get it all building with Nix, and then once you've got it into Nix, you can

kind of, like, lift it up, and then all the facilities that Nix has for building you a VM image or just building a nice, like really clean little Python Docker image for you, it can just take that. So that's been fun. And then just recently, someone made CLJ Nix, which is some Nix helpers for Clojure projects, which is really in the same vein, but even more niche. So, you know, it was right up my alley. I had to dive right in. And then just to keep down that track, I don't know how you say it, but there's a version OS inspired by Nix, Geeks, I think, GNU Geeks. It's quite similar to Nix, except the syntax is Lisp,

so it's even better somehow. Now, it's a GNU project, so it's a little more limited. It's in the GNU ecosystem. The packages that it has are all free software. So I don't think I would actually, even though I love anything Lisp, really, I don't think that I would do it. But they have been celebrating like 10 years, I think, of the project recently. So we've got a link in the show notes if you want to hear about some of the stories behind what it takes to bank a project like that. Yeah, that is really neat. Okay, so this poetry stuff looks absolutely fantastic.

Link to all of that in the notes. That's great. Now, I know, Brent, I know that you had some time recently to play around with Nix on a Raspberry Pi, which is the direction I want to take this. So I'm curious how your NixOS challenge is going so far and what your experience has been. Yeah, I was able to, if you remember last time, use a VM to run a desktop and such. So I had a good time there. But I figured I would try. This entire month has been trying to convince Alex

that maybe there's something to Nix. So recently he and I both jumped on a Raspberry Pi to get things going. That was a nice opportunity to get me working on a Raspberry Pi for the very first time. So wait, wait. So this is your first Pi. And I think you said you guys are tag teaming that? How did this work? Let's hear a little bit more about that. Well, we had to cut the Pi in half, you see. No, Alex has a drawer of trinkets here and there are many pies there so we figured we would get one set up he's got a nice corner here that's like dedicated to

pie playing with so he let me sort of wipe the system on there and just have a go at it and i thought that would be a great way to experience the pie for the first time we ended up sharing a tmux session for a little while too so we could both SSH in from our laptops and sit comfortably rather than hunching over the same screen. Nice. Which was a nice trick. That is a good way to do it. Like gentlemen, I assume Brent was already in the recliner and just didn't want to get up. That was your solution. No, that was my spot, which is exactly where he's sitting now. So what was the experience like on Raspberry Pi? Is the performance okay? How did all of that operate? I was very impressed. The memory footprint of a freshly booted Raspberry Pi

is 100 meg or so on Nikon. 127. That was with tail scale and Docker services running. So I'm subtracting a little just for those as a guess. But we got to the end of the evenings messing about and I said to Brent, oh, which USB stick did you use? And he was like, I didn't. I used an SD card. I didn't know better. Oh, so the performance was better than you expected,

I take it, if you didn't notice. Compared to what I'm used to with like apt install whatever and how long apt takes to do what it does on Raspberry Pi OS and ubuntu which is what i'm familiar with the nix was it nix os rebuild switch command took about i don't know 20 seconds 25 seconds each time yeah which gets a little laborious when you're making a one-line config change but uh overall we were left with what a 40 line configuration file, which declared the entire system. It's very elegant, I've got to say. And I know Brent said

a few minutes ago, he's been trying to convince me. And there was a few light bulbs went on last night. And I remember feeling that way about Docker about eight years ago. I remember a specific moment, Alex, where you got quite excited while we defined Docker virtualization. Yes, I did, because they spell virtualization correctly. We tried to spell virtualization with a Z and it didn't work. And then I read the documentation properly and it spelled it with an S and I was like, hey, British. Well, Europeans is what they are. I think that's a really astute observation, though, about the Docker experience on Nix, because in my developing, working on containers on a daily basis that are not desktop Linux nerds, advocates for Nix and NixOS as the platform where they curate, develop, and produce their

production containers. It's not perfect though. For example, why are there three manuals for NixOS? Yeah, I found that as well. The documentation can be a bit almost too complete, but spread out in a bunch of different places. So that can, I don't know, eat up a little bit of time and frustration, but once you get it. And quite contradictory. Sometimes even the same wiki page contradicts itself with a little headline saying, this bit's out of date, when three lines above is the actual correct answer. That can be quite confusing. I think that's fair observation, right?

And for everything that I see as potential with NixOS, I'm going to try and frame this in a way that isn't too incendiary. But if you think about Debian as being a project, Ubuntu was very much the product, right? the product right so it took all of the best bits of debian and productized it which is why ubuntu sort of soared to success and i'm not advocating for somebody to create a derivative of nix os in order to turn what is an extremely interesting and high potential project into a product. But I would absolutely love to see the shoulder of the community behind NixOS as it is now to turn it from exciting project to viable product. Wimby, what you just said, you put exact words to my thought process here. In my experience of using Linux distributions,

this is very much in like the proto-Debian stage. I recognize it's been around for a decade. But it clearly would benefit from a canonical type organization coming along and making a product out of this thing. Maybe it's not for that. Maybe it's for people who want to build infrastructure. And maybe that makes sense. But I am honestly surprised nobody's given a go at it. Or if they have, I just haven't found it yet. And I agree. But I would I would dearly love for us to learn from our, you know, Linux past and not be the Manjaro to Arch or the Ubuntu to Debian and just invest in

what is NixOS now and get buy-in and help that existing vibrant community to be more successful. Yeah, right. That is the way to do it now. In 2022, that's the way to do it. That's the way you got to do it now. And there is that. I mean, I have been impressed with the community just on our own matrix and just around, you know,

I think it's true that it's at the stage where the docs don't necessarily always match and it's kind of living and you really have to be able to figure out the next expression language to be able to debug what's going on.

But there are a lot of people who are willing to help get you on board if you're willing to take the step to step over the line and start But there are a lot of people who are willing to help get you on board if you're willing to take the step to step over the line and start asking those questions in one of those spaces. We had another little odd experience where we were trying to create a user for the first time. We actually, funnily enough, managed to lock ourselves completely out of the OS three, four times. Well done, gentlemen. Well done. This is essential experience for Brent, I think, on his journey to being an admin.

We deleted the NixOS user, of course, without realizing it, without reading what was right in front of us, rebooted and went, actually, no, we couldn't reboot because suddenly I typed sudo and it said this user account is disabled or whatever. So then we had to hard power off the Pi.

Eventually, we ended up getting to the point where we created the user uh of you know alex or whatever but we couldn't log in it said this account is disabled so we we could log in as root and we looked and the default shell was set to sbin no login so we thought okay cool we'll just set the default shell to bash and call it good. For some reason, setting the default shell for all the users did nothing. And we had to explicitly specify per user the shell. And that was quite frustrating. Oh yeah, sure.

Couldn't log in because there's no shell to log into. Yeah, my discourageness, I guess, discouragement that I've been feeling recently is because I think I picked the absolute worst project. It does kind of seem that way. It does, unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, you guys know that I kind of came into this thinking what I would ultimately like to do is either rebuild my Raspberry Pi, Pi-za, in my home setup in Lady Jupes with Nix or kind of like moonshot was maybe take a mac mini m1 and get nix os running on that and replace three raspberry pies with one m1 mini running nix os however the primary job i mean

there's a lot of there's a lot of jobs that this thing would have to do but the one that actually automates and runs the rv is Assistant. Like the absolute mission critical application is Home Assistant. And it seems like maybe I picked the absolute worst candidate for a Nix install. Maybe that's good. I don't know. And there's more I need to solve. But I'm kind of disappointed right now in my options. And not all of it is really Nix's fault.

Some of it is actually the Home Assistant project's fault. For an example, on an ARM platform, I can install Home Assistant as a Nix module, but I get less than everything I need. And what I do need, it's a manual process to add things, even things that like just are small tweaks to add a component to the Lovelace dashboard. I have to manually define and configure all of it in Nix configuration files. And so that means like, I can't just do that sort of like I'm in the UI, I'm browsing, I get inspiration, and I just want to add a module and just try it. It means no, I have to stop what I'm doing, I have to SSH in, I have to find the right syntax, which I have to find somebody else who's done an

example of this for me. I think you are running into one of the sort of inherent pain points of taking this approach. The plus side is it means you've totally specified it and you can make it happen again instantly. Right. But it is not the same. Now, sometimes you can get the best of both worlds there, but you're right in this case, like you got to you got to get there quite painstakingly. And if this was Samba, if this was Nginx, if this was SyncThing, this wouldn't be a total non-issue, right? But the Home Assistant project has what really makes it great are community add-ons, are these additional add-ons that have been created that are easy to add when you have the entire Home Assistant experience. I could install Home Assistant as an OCI container, which is probably ultimately what I'll do. But that uses Podman, which is great, but not my core skill set at the moment when it comes to container management.

And when it is this home system that actually runs my RV, I'm not super thrilled about that. You know, I went down a path that went a little closer to more of the Docker Compose path that you're familiar with. So there might be something to play with there, but you're right. It is different. And as you say, right, like anything but running the whole sort of expected Home Assistant experience is a little bit outside the mainstream and limits you in what exactly you can do. And in that configuration, we're just talking about Home Assistant core. We're not talking about all the community bits and the supervisor management. To get that, I basically have to go with a whole VM. Right. Is Podman a requirement? Or, you know, because we

got Docker running in a couple of minutes. Oh no, you absolutely can do. It's like the version that's packaged by the community that uses this whole OCI container process, that's set up to use Podman. But what I think Wes is probably right, is I probably could just go the Docker Compose route and go that way. But, you know, that's me kind of coming to like a new goalpost.

Because the goalpost originally was a totally orchestrated home automation system that is 100% reproducible and only changes when I mandate it to change. That was the goal. And now I'm kind of basically just getting back to exactly where I'm at now. I'm kind of basically just getting back to exactly where I'm at now. I tell you, when you started this NixOS challenge and you set those goals about having like a standardized JB build for our VPSs and, you know, maybe some of your pies and stuff, I thought you were mad. But after doing this last night, genuinely some light bulbs went on for me. And there's a real elegance to doing it this way.

You declare everything and you solve a problem one time and then it's solved forever. Yeah. And you could see how for a guy like me who like every now and then I get these bursts of inspiration where I've got project time and I, I create some great stuff. It's the one time you can focus, you get really deep in, you'll learn all the stuff, you get that in your head. And it's becoming more and more rare because I got, you know, I got young kids and they're getting older. I got limited time. That's where, that's where some of my, my extra time goes now. So you have to run a business.

Like Alex says, it's like now that I can solve it once and it also self documents, it's self-documenting in how it works too, which is for a guy who never gets around to documentation, just beautiful. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to find some sort of like middle ground here. Part of what makes this tricky is Home Assistant, the project, and many projects do this. They don't release just a generic ARM64 image. They have Raspberry Pi images. They have maybe, you know, a Synology image or a Pine image, right? But they don't, for most projects, they don't just offer an effing ARM64 image, even though there's more and more just ARM64 systems out there and the Mac M1 systems are a great example of this. are a great example of this.

And not only that, but there's more and more of us out there that might have a Mac with virtualization and we want to run Linux and we need ARM64 images. But our community still has it in their little heads that the only people that are using ARM are on Raspberry Pis.

And the Home Assistant project is included in this group. And so I can't just download a Home Assistant ARM VM image that I can run on ARM64. I can get a Raspberry Pi image. I can get a Raspberry Pi 3 image. I can get a Synology ARM image, but I can't get an ARM64 image. And it's so frustrating, but that's what it is.

So the Nix stuff has been really great. And like my Bitcoin node, oh man, I could totally see why I'd want to run Nix on that. But for my home assistant system, I have to just live with the fact that I'm not getting all the benefits that Nix and NixOS offer. It's really the Nix package manager that offers. And it's just going to be the way it is

because that's how the upstream project decided to operate. And I realize it's not their target, right? They want people running their own VM. But what I have discovered is some of the absolute best conversations I've had in Linux recently and just geeking out about Linux stuff have been with other NixOS users. They're really a clever bunch. They're solving problems in really cool ways. And kind of once you start working your way through using Nix, you start

thinking about how you could build systems differently. And I think it changes the way you think about stuff. I've been impressed too that, you know, especially for some, you know, a purely functional, you know, declarative environment, you'd think it might be kind of a little hardcore or everyone's like really focused. Kind of like sometimes we see with some of the dogmatism on the free software side of things. That's really not been my experience. You know, I think they recognize it's a weird way to do things. It's not what you're used to. It's not perfect.

There's lots of areas that don't quite work as well as you'd like or have areas that are lacking polish. But it seems like that's pretty upfront to people like, oh yeah, that's not perfect, but here's how I might solve that or here's a workaround that could work for you. That's exactly been my experience

and it's been very positive and it has made the community, even though it's probably just a portion of the community, right. But it has made that portion of the community who is on Matrix just seem very welcoming and has not made me afraid to ask silly questions. I've not once been told like RTFM, you noob. Right. That people walked me through it. And it's been it's been a good experience and not just myself. not just myself. Okay, so one of the things that came up in these discussions when we launched the whole Nix challenge is, should we just be doing this with Ansible? And I know that was a position that Alex felt pretty strongly. So now that you've played with it a little bit, Alex, and had some time, what are your thoughts now where we started this with NixOS or Ansible? Is this similar? Are they solving the same problem? What's your takeaway? Both are declarative configuration mechanisms, and ansible requires

a reasonable amount of learning a couple of days worth of learning i would say to be proficient in the basics and i kind of wanted to equate that to what brent and i spent last night doing of maybe what three or four hours of hacking around and we had a fully functional declarative system one thing we don't have with the NixOS config file as it stands right now is a way to automate that with a Git repository, which Ansible kind of automatically pushes you towards because there's so many different files to manage.

But essentially they're solving the same problem and the learning curve between the two is, I'd say Ansible's probably a bit easier. And using my experience and Brent's experience between the two is, I'd say Ansible's probably a bit easier. And using my experience and Brent's experience between the two of us, we could actually solve quite a lot of problems

more quickly than either of us individually, which I thought was interesting. But, you know, Nix does take a bit of, you've got to, I think what you said, Brent, was forget everything you've learned about Linux

in the last decade. I wonder if it'd be easier to teach a newbie someone who hadn't already you know dealt with the standard Linux distro sometimes it is when you don't have all the bias of the past well often we did run into issues that were like well I can't I can't log in because there's no user this is such a strange thing but it's only because we've assumed that that stuff was defined you know and once you do it it's very very very very very very easy very, very, very easy. But it took us a few moments to be like, oh yeah, that is what's happening. We have to actually tell it that we want it to exist. So you just kind of have to forget about the assumed defaults.

And you found the GitHub community about NixOS pretty interesting too, right? Well, we did set up a little GitHub, Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub discussions where we encouraged everyone who, you know, thank you for joining us on this NixOS challenge this month. And we were able to gather a whole bunch of screenshots from the community. And also there are some amazing discussions on different configurations that people used and different ways they solve problems. There's a whole bunch of like additional bonus goals if you want extra meaningless points on like setting up a home manager and things like that. Exactly. So I would encourage, you know, even if we're sort of softly celebrating the end of the challenge here today. I think there's a lot of great resources there. It's worth diving in and reading what the community has shared there.

I was blown away by the knowledge and also the willingness of our listeners to jump in on this experience with us. So thank you. Yeah, I want to just echo that. I am very thrilled that so many people were willing to just play along with us. So thank you. Yeah, I want to just echo that. I am very thrilled that so many people were willing to just play along with us on this just to have fun and that so many people that didn't necessarily engage, they're just willing to listen to see how our experience went. And I think we should keep it going because this is going to be something that is ongoing. And I think the NixOS Challenge Matrix Room should keep going too, because I'm going to have more questions. And I think what is now sort of the awkward elephant in the room

is what do we do about these new physical servers we have here in the studio that we haven't fully deployed yet? Do we pause and go with Nix on them? I think we would do a new poll for the community, but it just has one option. That makes it legitimate, right? Right, yeah, totally. You want to, let's do that.

That's a dictatorship, not democracy. Let's see. We'll put it together. Maybe we'll let the people decide. We'll let the people decide. May I just add a little summary to what you were just saying about like the GitHub community? Please. I think it makes perfect sense that you got good support and information from the GitHub community surrounding NixOS, because the people that are using NixOS to, they're industry professionals that want great

tooling to solve problems. And you get that sort of stack overflow experience from that community. And it's a bit sad that after all of these years, the partisanship that exists within the linux desktop community is still so toxic and unhelpful and yet when you look at where work happens and you know effective deployments need to be you know, documented, and helpful support exists. That exists outside of what we would call mainstream desktop Linux. Yeah, I think it could make a lot of sense for us. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make a poll.

And I'll put a link in the show notes. Should we use NixOS as our cloud and local server OS? There's two options. Yes, and stick with Seuss, you lizard haters. We'll put a link in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 455. And keep in mind, a vote for yes means that a lot of times we're going to have to come up with some way to get NixOS running on a VPS. Because we've managed to do it on Linode, but I don't know if other VPS providers are going to let us replace their images with NixOS. So keep in mind.

But for our local systems and for all of that going forward, I can see a real healthy setup here. I'm not trying to backtrack on the Tumbleweed, but I could see a healthy setup here of Proxmox, which has maybe some Tumbleweed systems. It has some Nix systems. And we have all of these systems working together. And what I would possibly see us doing is just moving more and more and more infrastructure over to these three boxes.

And as we do that, some of them are going to have audience critical facing features because word has it they are deploying fiber in this neighborhood. And if they start deploying fiber here, I'm probably going to start spinning up more and more services. JBDC becomes a real thing. Yeah, so we better get that cooling installed because we're going to have Brent. I heard you. I heard you. Totally plus one to Proxmox.

particularizing NixOS so that it might become more widespread and a supported option in the VPS and cloud providers. We may create a little market demand. I've been quite impressed with the whole NixOS lustrate and just the ability to get Nix running just about anywhere and then further NixOS to take over a box. There's a lot of potential there, too. Also, it feels as bare minimum as an Arch install or a Gen 2 install, but is a fraction of the time to get it up and running. You basically got to partition your disk, add a couple of config options, and then you're good to go. And mount a few things, right? Wes and I now, on multiple occasions,

have just stood up a quick NixOS box to try something just after a show or something. It's not a big deal to get it going. I'd just like to add that, you know, working with the Nix community, we invited them to a SnapCross Summit, what's this now, three years ago. And the quickest, easiest way to make a Snap is to use Nix, the packaging platform. I hadn't even thought, but of course. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. They added it as just another container platform to, you know, create your apps and it works extraordinarily well. I like it. Thank you, Wimpy. See, this is a perfect episode to have Wimpy with us for this, right? All right. Well, so we'll have links to the GitHub if you'd like to still participate. It's going to go on.

We're going to keep it up. We're still going. We're still learning. The process is really just beginning with this challenge. But I hope that the month of April was an opportunity for us to get rolling. This is our last episode in the month of April, if you can believe it.

So let us know what you think and find that next challenge room in the matrix if you want to chat with other folks and find that GitHub link at linuxunplugged.com slash 455. Bitwarden. com slash Linux. Get started with a free trial of Teams or an enterprise plan at Bitwarden dot com slash Linux. Go try it for free as an individual user. I am so stoked to have Bitwarden here as a sponsor. You know, like this is way better than telling you about a mattress, right? This is telling you about a way to keep your online

account secure. And if you're in the enterprise, there's a lot of great options here now too as well. You know, you can share and sync your sensitive data, of course, but Bitwarden is fully customizable. You can turn features on and off with enterprise policies and it's open source. They have had their core code audited. They've had people look at it. You know, Bitwarden started in 2016 and they've just been iterating on this idea to make it better and better and better. A few years ago, I decided to switch to Bitwarden and I have been absolutely happy with the choice. I like the command line

option to tell you the truth. That's been really handy on my SSH boxes, but also I have it installed in my browser as an extension and on my mobile devices. So when I bring up something on my mobile device, I can log in with a really long, complicated password. And it supports two-factor authentication on the internet phones from the Apple Corporation. It supports the face ID for unlocking, like all of that. And of course, other biometrics as well. And one of the things that gives me confidence in Bitwarden is they do have a self-hosted option. So if I ever get to the point where I'm like, you know what, time to go this way, I can. But if you also just want to get up and running in minutes, Bitwarden Cloud is a fantastic option. And they have a large active community that's always available on their forums

and Reddit plus support as well. And I think one of the things that I didn't really understand, but now I can kind of grok is just maybe a game changer for a lot of you out there, is Bitwarden has introduced account switching for your personal stuff, your work stuff, your open source project stuff, you know, all that kind of thing. You can now isolate it out, you know, separate it out between the different jobs, which is really a nice feature. That's perfect. Yeah. Right. You move on from one place. I don't need, I mean, they're going to change the passwords anyway, right? Those don't work. I don't need them cluttering things up. That is what I used to do. I used to have it all like a database. One, that's not a great practice to start with. And then two, yeah, it's bad for you as well.

It's not good. It's not good. And really, let's be honest, you may already know all this. You might be already using Bitwarden even, but maybe friends, maybe family, maybe others out there aren't. Maybe the place you work at hasn't really figured out their password management strategy yet. Maybe the place you work at hasn't really figured out their password management strategy yet. Yikes. Well, tell them to go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go try it out for yourself or your business, and you'll support the show. And you're going to do something.

Just this one thing could really help protect you online. You know, there's a lot of stuff, but good passwords that are individual for each website, that's key. That really makes a big difference. And support the show and do that at bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's easy to get started. You just go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. As usual, we received some great feedback this week, one of which David wanted us to play with a welder that he works on. Now, normally we don't kind of consider that kind of adult request on the show, but this one time.

It's true. Thank you, Wes. He writes, David writes, If you want to weld with a full-feature state-of-the-art welder running Linux, I can make that happen. I work as a professional on the equipment and tech support. The front panel, which is a 7-inch touchscreen, and many of the boards run Linux. The front panel is nearly a full Linux stack, including Wi-Fi, NFC, and Bluetooth support.

It also hosts a website to manage the hardware, OPC UA server, and MQTT for generating metrics. Oh, no way! I know, this thing's amazing. It runs a fairly modern kernel and the R&D guys call the distribution WeldOS internally.

Oh my gosh. How cool is that? Isn't that great? WeldOS? Linux? I mean, you know, for Linux Action Show, I used to have this bit

at the beginning of every show where I'd say, this runs Linux? I never once, ever, in hundreds of episodes, had a welder that runs Linux. But, I mean, is there another operating system you trust in that kind of environment? You know, back in the day, it would have been Windows CE. Remember that period of time when CE was just like all kinds of horrible stuff?

They're building a new light rail stop near my house, and I can see, like, it's not operational yet. I can see one of the TVs. It's running Windows. Oh, God. I know. I want to say something the TVs. It's running Windows. Oh, God. I know. I want to say something, but... They need an intervention. He mentions that licenses and source code are available,

if you look hard enough or ask kindly enough. And, Chris, did you do any image searches of this thing? It's the Fronius TPSI, to get a sense of sort of what it looked like. I had to go take a look. I'll put a link in the show notes. It does have what kind of just looks like a tablet behind a piece of plexiglass installed at the top of this thing. I grew up with a family member who was a welder by trade.

And these things, they sit out in the rain. I mean, they try not to, but it happens. It's like on the back of their truck. It gets rained on or they're at a job site and the weather changes. They get cement on them. They get dust on them. They get sawdust like they this is you really got to appreciate like this is a computer that is going to live through hell. Industrial doesn't do it justice when you talk about the kind of thing it's going to go through. So, David, thank you. I think also worth mentioning is that downtime is darn expensive if you're running one of these. So I would imagine they put a lot of effort into that. Also, I appreciate that David said that if we're ever in the Chicago area, that he'd totally give us a tour of the lab that he works at. Well, you were just talking about that Chicago meetup. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it.

All right. Well, this next bit of feedback wasn't directly sent into the show. I was listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show, which is a fantastic production by Adam Curry and Dave Jones. Dave Jones has been on the show before. And they talk about all of the developments and happenings in the podcast world, which, of course, I'm always fascinated by. And Adam Curry, the podfather, he now listens to Linux Unplugged, which welcome into the show, Adam. Thank you for listening. Glad to have you as one of our audience members. Absolutely. And he had what I would imagine is a very legitimate

question that most new listeners have when they tune into the show. And that is, how the hell do you guys try out so many Linux distributions? They're always testing out new Linux installs. That's a lot of what they do, or Linux upgrades. And distros. And I'm wondering, does anyone have, you know, so I'm running Linux Mint as my daily driver. Now, if I wanted to migrate, I'd be in trouble. I mean, I have stuff installed. I sure have some php version

what do these guys do they have one laptop that's really their laptop and they use it and they don't mess with it and they have another junker that they change all the time or is there a simple way to move your environment over in the in the in the linux environment where you move a lot of stuff over or just wind up reinstalling everything. Well, if you're using Nick Shell, you see. Yeah, with Nick Shell, you can just load it and go. No, this is a fair question. And Adam has it close, but just slightly backwards.

Like one of my nicest machines, which is a ThinkPad, is my distro hopping box most of the time. And my workstation that I never really reinstall very often, maybe once every four or five years, that's an old clunker. That's the one that doesn't get any love. And that's my way of doing it. It's just I have a separate machine. But each of us has our own approach. Wes has some crazy approaches that he uses. Well, yeah. I mean, I'm an animal, so I use QEMU on the command line powered by KUXEC to install things

and then reboot to, you know, because sometimes you want to try like native graphics drivers. Right. But if you don't want to be crazy, I mean, Wimpy has a wonderful project out there, QuickEMU, that, you know, that'll do all the work for you.

Yeah, that's actually my method of choice is, you know, I don't have 27 machines laying around like most of you do or seem to. And thus, Wimpy, thank you. Thank you. I've been using Quick EMU a ton. Been loving it to do a bunch of, you know, participate in some testing weeks for the new Ubuntu release and things like that. So it's been a wild ride and I've loved it.

You're welcome. And it wasn't invented by accident. It is the non-animal approach to what, you know, Wes does. wild ride and I've loved it. You're welcome. And it wasn't invented by accident. It is the non-animal approach to what, you know, Wes does. I wouldn't want my experience to be had by anyone else. So I'm glad that you sanitized it for the civilized world. We'll put a link to Quick EMU in the show notes, but it's basically just a project that is absolutely something we've all wanted forever. And now it also has a GUI component as well. So it's not just a command line thing you got to do, but it lets

you quickly create really optimized VMs on a Linux box. And what Wimpy has done and the people that are working now on the GUI have done is made it super simple to just say, I want to run this distribution or Windows or whatever it might be. And then it sets up all the backend like fiddly stuff for the virtual machine to make it run at absolute best possible speed and graphics and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we just tried it out for the first time the other week and it was nice.

It's great. Yeah, there's even a sister project that sets up a GPU pass through. And what was I going to say? I've forgotten. But you can do GPU pass-through now through a sister project. Very nice.

And now it is time for Le Boost. We got some amazing boosts this week. Thank you very much. Tomato Deer writes in with 5,000 sats. Thanks for RSS Hub recommendation. I wanted to give honorable mentions to Mini Fl flux for articles wallabag for archival so those i think would be considered two picks yeah all right i think alex

uses mini flux right i did for a little while but the requirements to get it set up were a little bit onerous uh docker compose there's a lot of database stuff to futz around with and gotcha it works but it's not for the faint of heart. It does seem really sweet as far as like, if you were somebody who consumes a lot of news and you bring a lot of different feeds in and you want something that's clean and manageable, Miniflux looks great for that.

But he also linked in here Wallabag, which is a web application that lets you save web pages for reading later. So it's sort of like an Instapaper or Pocket, but one you can self-host. Oh, now that looks handy. And what a fun name. We also covered Wallabag in LUP 378, if you're interested.

Very good. We got a boost from DFJ 225 four days ago with 4,000 sats. I was inspired by the show to give the value-for-value model a try using decentralized technologies. Right on, brother. Thanks for putting out the interesting show to the world. And, you know, something else I've noticed is we're not getting as many boosts, but we're getting more people who are just streaming sats as they listen. And so this has us talking internally about ways that maybe we could expose

some of the membership features to people who are doing this, because that's incredible. It's such a neat thing to open up Helipad and see people there as they listen, some sats are coming in. And as part of the value that I want to return to the audience who is sending this boost, I have set up an old monitor in my office that I've turned on its side with a Raspberry Pi. And I just have the boost up on that screen all the time when I'm in my office. So it has now become like the fastest way to get a message in front of my face and make me smile. They come in, pew, pew. And, you know, I have it up all the time.

I came in my office today. Before I even sat down at my desk, I heard a pew as a boost came in. And it's just so awesome because I actually turned out, it turned out to be kind of a rough morning. And so as I was sitting down at my desk, I got a boost and it just, I don't know, it makes me smile. Yeah, Chris smile button. We could all use one of those. And you and I have been chatting about ways to maybe automate tooling around those boosts, like capturing them from the back end of Helipad and perhaps putting them into the chat rooms of various shows.

Right. I mean, we like seeing them. Why not make it easier? Yeah. Well, what's cool is when you put all of this stuff behind open source software, right, you build it with open source software and you put it on an open decentralized network. Well, guess what we can do? We can build tools around that because anyone can participate. So we could build tools that bring all the different boosts into the individual show docs automatically or put them in front of the hosts in a way that you could never really do with email without some sort of really crappy rickety filtering. And that's why I think boosts are an important part of value for value going forward. Now, value for value is a separate

thing. That could be any payment system or it could be your time. It could be effort. It is a concept where listeners are asked to share their value they get from listening to the podcast and its producers. In most cases, that means like a dollar amount because that's just what we all have available. We don't have a lot of time, but it could be other things, too. It could be one off help. It could be maybe participating in our mumble room on a Sunday and helping people get their mic working. It could be coming up to the RV and helping with your time. It could be creating a piece of artwork that we use for something. It could be participating in a show and adding a bit of information. Like there's so many ways to contribute value back. It could be giving us a ride in your Tesla. Or just showing up to our meetup. I mean, gosh. Yeah. Well, these guys got

a, they had a listener come give them a ride this week in their Tesla. Well, that's extra special. I'm jealous. He showed us the full self-driving mode and it was an experience, hey Brent? It was anyways, it was interesting. Thank you, Lucas, for giving us the best coffee of the week. Yes, very much. Ah, very nice. Yeah, so if

you'd like to send us a boost, go grab a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com. If you don't want to switch podcast apps, I have been experimenting this week with the Breeze Wallet, B-R-E-E-Z. It's a lightning destination, is essentially what they're trying to create. It's worth checking out for you Antenapod users out there, because I don't know if the Antenapod project is going to integrate Boost directly right now, but they are investigating integrating with the Breeze Wallet. So you could kind of get ahead of the curve there

if you're on antenna pod and grab breeze you listen to antenna pod you add one of our shows to breeze and then you just send the boost that way it's a pretty great way to do it and then um breeze itself is open source in fact most of its gpl is pretty great and what i'm going to do and west let's remember to let's remember to put this like in the description i'm going to add our lightning node address directly so if you want to use something like the boost cli or some other tool that isn't necessarily a podcast app you can or if you want to open up a channel to us you absolutely can we'll have a link to that but we'll also put our lightning node address in the description. And you know what?

Let's build out that peer-to-peer network because I believe after having done this for 15 years, this is probably going to be a component of the next 15 years of content creation. And when you combine what Adam and Dave and the team are working on with Podcasting 2.0, you're getting incredible features. They're going to add real, actual new things to podcasting that is needed for a decade. We're not there just yet for everyone, but we are there for early adopters. And it's very, very exciting. So if you'd like to participate in that, we'll have all of that information in the show notes. But we do have an interesting, perhaps risque pick before we get out of here. I chose this one again. I guess this is the second

week in a row where I have the pick. Really abusing your showrunner privileges. I just came across this and I haven't tried it yet but this is more like a hey. Hasn't even tried it. I know. I normally don't do that. I normally don't. But I wanted to get the word out there and collect feedback. So send us a boost in if you've tried this. It's Proxmox V7

or the Raspberry Pi. Of course. So it converts. This isn't something they release as a project. You can't go get Proxmox v7 or the raspberry of course so it converts this isn't something they release as a project you can't go get proxmox for arm boxes see my earlier rant in the show but you can install raspbian and then use this script called pymox to convert that raspbian install into a full proxmox node which can be fun for like backup testing, or maybe you just want to run a couple of things like the gosh darn home assistant VM on your Raspberry Pi. I know. Or maybe you want to build more of that ARM64 software goodness that you were missing out on earlier. I'd love to see that too. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Pimoc7 is the project name. And if you've tried this or if you do try it, please let me know what you think, because I almost did it to one of my production pies this weekend so I could report it on the show. But I chickened out. I totally chickened out. I just didn't want to break the internet. I was doing a lot of projects this weekend, and it was one of those where like, okay, I I got 10 minutes in, and I got to go look up, like, the next step on YouTube. You know what I'm talking about? However, I am happy to report that I think I have figured out what has been causing me some issues in Lady Joops' water system. Whoa.

I'm feeling, like, you know, empowered and shit. So there's that. And I got my tires filled up, and I got my solar panels cleaned. Like, I got some work done, but I just didn't get this. So your tech life is in disarray, but your physical life looked pretty decent. But maybe this could be a solution for me. Maybe this could be a solution. Maybe I could have my home assistant cake and eat it too. And I could have a Proxmox Raspberry Pi 4 compute module that has a NixOS system that runs like all of my services except for Home Assistant

and then a separate Home Assistant VM. I just want two VMs. Let me know if you've tried Pimox. Send us a booster and email linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Well, let's see. Let's wrap it up. Wimpy, it's been forever since you've joined us. Is there anywhere you want to send folks, any websites or social accounts you want people to check out? or social accounts you want people to check out? Two places. I would like to encourage people to have a listen to Linux Downtime, episode 45, where Joe and Adam and I have a discussion

about what goes into making a Linux desktop distribution. And if you want to learn more about making Linux desktop distributions and the other projects I work on, I mentioned Deb get earlier, then head to Wimpy's World and you can find the places where I stream and you can join me live as I cut some code and work on this stuff. Cut some code. I like that idea. Thanks, Wimpy. Alex, should we send people to self-hosted show?

Self-hosted.show? I think that's a pretty good place to send people. All right. And Brent, I'm going to pretty good place to send people. All right. And Brent, I'm going to tell people what? Check us out right here. Okay. I think is unless you have some other ideas. No, no, no.

You know, you should plug now, Brent. You should go into like, you should go into plug mode and be like, oh, check me out on Office Hours. I was on the recent Office Hours episode. Yeah. Yeah. Office Hours number, is it one? No, it's two. It's two.

Check Chris and I out on Office Hours episode two. And what's that domain, Brent? Office.hair. Office.hours.hair! Oh! Office.hair is surprisingly taken. We're going to, yeah. We obviously need to have a production meeting here because

clearly we've got to get our plugs down. All right, well, you can find this here podcast at Linux Unplugged on the Twitters. We do this show live. And we'd love to have you join our mumble room or chat room or just watch and enjoy. We do it on Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

And, of course, don't miss Linux Action News. If you're not catching Linux Action, you're not getting everything. I'm so frustrated with them, Wes. Yeah, because we save the best stuff. We save it for land. We don't put it in this show. No.

Anyways, linuxactionnews.com for that. And, you know, go get a little more stuff. Linux stuff. And of course, we always encourage you to keep the conversation rolling. We've got the contact page. We've got the Matrix info, the Mumble info, all of it. Even the links.

Even the RSS feeds. That's over at linuxunplugged.com. It's real simple. It's just linuxunplugged.com. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. See you right back here next Sunday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි All right, let's go boat, jbtitles.com. These are the final days of the IRC before we all switch to Discord. So let's go.

It's a wise decision that I fully endorse. And also, I'll offer my professional services to help you make that transition. You should launch Wimpy's Matrix to Discord conversion services. No, I've been asked to do that, and I've shot that down from the sky every time it's come up. Because I don't need those three extra users on top of the two and a half thousand users we already have in the Wimpy's World Discord. and a half thousand users we already have in the Wimpy's World Discord. What we need is a,

we need a good old classic race and whichever title bot gets finished first for the matrix of the Discord, that's the way we go, right? Oh, well, I mean, Gamma's got a pretty sweet bot going. Well, the race is on.