LINUX Unplugged - 456: Our Linux Regrets

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

If we could change just one mistake in our Linux journey, what would it be? Open a channel to our node: 037d284d2d7e6cec7623 (https://amboss.space/node/037d284d2d7e6cec7623adbe600450a73b42fb90800989f05a862464b05408df39)

I'm on a podcast in the podcast at social. So I actually do have a mastodon account. It's funny. Cause I was asking people if they had a mastodon account and they were like, are you going to set one up? And I was like, no, I don't think so.

I don't think I'm going to, I don't really want to do any social media. I'm pretty burned out on social media. And then I realized I actually already had a mastodon account set up and that I was using it actively, but I just didn't think of it as mastodon because I'm just using it to interact with the, uh,

podcasting 2.0 folks in the community over there. And so I didn't even really consider it mastodon, but it totes my goats is so, uh, because I'm just using it to interact with the Podcasting 2.0 folks in the community over there. So I didn't even really consider it Mastodon. But it totes my goats is. So I am, see, if you want to come, although I'm really not tweeting much for public consumption, it's mostly for people that are interested in podcasting, but I'll put a link to my profile. It's podcastindex.social, and guess what?

I'm Chris Lass on there. Oh, hey, I like podcasting. Yeah, you might want to. Have I sent you an invite? I'm Chris Lass on there. Oh, Hey, I like podcasting. Yeah. You, you might want to, have I sent you an invite? I don't think so. I wonder if I could, uh,

I'll have to figure that out, but I got a little picture of Levi on my profile. I think, I think Brent took that picture too. I think. Do you remember when it was taken? Probably the sprint. Cause it's Levi laying on the couch.

I think. I mean, when does Levi not lay on the couch? That's the thing is that doesn't really narrow it down, I think. I mean, when does Levi not lay on the couch? That's the thing, if that doesn't really narrow it down, I realize. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen, both looking very sharp today, and I... We had to trade outfits at the last minute, can you tell?

I can, but I like that you guys make the effort. You know, it's a show day, it's special. Well, coming up today, if we had a Linux time machine, what would we change in our Linux past? If we could go back and make one tweak or correction, do we have any regrets, something we would do differently, maybe put us on a better Linux path? Each one of us will share

a bit of a retrospective lesson today. Then, of course, we'll round it up with some great boosts and emails and a lot more, like we always do. So before we go any further, let's say a big hearty welcome to the people who decided to make it live, to make it special.

Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, hello. Hello, Chris. Hello, Wes, and hello, Brent. people who decided to make it live to make it special time appropriate greetings virtual lug hello mumble room hello hello hello hello hello brandt who made it zoidberg nice of zoidberg to make it yeah i apologize you have a sleepy crew here today like none of us got any sleep last night no so uh i don't know i don't know how today's show is even gonna go whatever happens don't hold us accountable please i wasn't even supposed to be here. I was going to be in a small little beach town in Oregon. It's nothing fancy, but a little beach town celebrating my son's 13th birthday, which if you've been listening since I started having kids, how crazy is that?

Because people have been. I know. People have been listening since before I had kids. That's crazy and um as we were uh getting ready to head out and you know of course i've arranged the entire last week of all of our recordings to make sure i could take friday and saturday off yeah you've been planning this for a while getting jupe ship shape you know like a lot of pre-planning to make this happen yep trying to get parts in trying to get her into the shop all that kind of stuff and of course friday morning as we're supposed to set out we realize dylan's sick and it's the kind of sick like maybe this gets better maybe this gets a lot worse and

the last time we went to this town it turned out was like early january 2020 it turned out we think and i had covid but we didn't know it at the time and so we were horrendously sick and we had locked ourselves into the RV. And that's how we spent our time in this town. And we just didn't want the. You didn't want to do that again. No. And we didn't want to have Dylan sick on the road. Fair.

Yeah. But canceling this road trip, he was just totally crushed. Right. And I was super bummed and all of that. So we decided to kind of do something a little simpler and just head out to our favorite spot in the woods, which is only like two hours out. Right. So if anything goes wrong, we're not still near home base. Yeah. So we decide, okay, let's do that. And plus we got a later start in the day and all that. So

this is a better route to go. And I, you know, I call up the place we're going to stay and I cancel and we start heading out. And my wife, Hadiyah, she's chasing the RV in her car. So she's behind me, right? She's's she's following us and as we hit highway 20 heading east heading towards the mountains we're doing about 60 miles per hour and my wife pings me on the two-way radio and she says we have some kind of major water leak going on right now and I'm like what what what she's like there's water pouring out of the RV it's covering my windshield I'm running my windshield wip. There's so much water coming out right now. That's insane. I'm like, oh my God. Right. I just think, oh no, if we have another major water leak happen, this, this place is wrecked. We've already had a major spill once.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Right. How much more can you withstand? Game over, man. Game over. Right. So I go into total disaster mode. At 60 miles an hour. Right. And I'm like, Dylan, help me find a spot to pull over. Cause he's riding passenger. Right. And he's like, I think I got something. I'm like, yeah, help me find a spot to pull over because he's riding passenger. And he's like, I think that's something like, yeah, OK, we're going to do it. And I pull over like super quick. I don't even know how the RV stopped like that. And unfortunately, like it was so quick and it was such a small space that he had to keep going because there's a whole line of cars behind her. Right. So she keeps on going down the road. I pull over and I start the troubleshooting. Right. I head outside and these vehicles, boom, boom, boom. They're blasting past me 65, 70 miles per hour.

There's no room on the shoulder, but of course that's the side, the driver's side where I was pulled over that was next to the road. That's the side where the water bay is at. And I can just see water pouring out of the water bay. And I go, God, so I have to open up the storage bay, which is like in the road.

It's in the highway because there's just no room here. And my phone starts blowing up and I think, this is hadia so i tap on the notification i opened up no no of course not it was a super nasty telegram something something got somebody upset that someone else said on another jb show and i of course had enabled this comment because they were on the jb airwaves And so I was an awful person. And here I'm just getting like this really nasty message. And I'm standing on the side of the road. Water's pouring out of my RV.

I got a sick kid. It's his birthday, right? I'm in full dad mode just trying to save a birthday road trip. I'm getting chewed out for something someone else said on another show. And I realized I've screwed up here. I've made some bad choices. Like this, this didn't come in via like the contact form. It didn't come in like via a boost, not using any of the systems that we've built to let us manage how and when like super emotionally charged criticism comes in. Because the way you do this over the longterm is you realize I'm not

in the headspace to be really criticized right now, to be told I'm the worst person on the planet. Maybe I'll put that off. Right. Cause this wasn't the right time. Yeah. I mean like, you know, you know, before you go look at one of our videos on YouTube, like you prepare yourself for that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Or like I sit down when I'm in the right space and I read the feedback and I prepare it and I bring it into the shows and it's a task that I do. But I way overshot on my availability and this moment really brings it in, right? Because there's a super emotionally charged message. There's no way for me to choose if this is the right time for this or not. So I got to make some significant changes in that regard. I hate to do it. After 15 years, though, I think I've

got to restructure how this is going to work, but I'll figure that out later. I had a problem to solve, right? I'm on the side of the road. Vehicles are blasting by me. I'm like opening up the bay. I'm looking at what's going wrong. I'm like trying to troubleshoot it. I'm radioing my wife to see if I can get her to turn around. She's already coming on her way back.

And I realized I'm looking at it. And like, what's happening is my water bay, which is a storage bay in my RV is like turning into a bathtub. And with my pump, the water pump that takes it from our fresh tank and supplies bathtub. And with my pump, the water pump that takes it from our fresh tank and supplies it all the faucets, the water pump is just like pouring water out of the pump. And it's like cracked wide open. And we had just filled up

like 75 gallons of water. So there's a lot of water to go. And I'm like, oh man, this is a big waste of water. That's no good. That really matters to us. But, of course, the other big problem was is we were heading to an off-grid spot. So we needed this water. There's no water out there for us to drink. You know, we wouldn't last a day out there. A functioning water system was kind of part of the plan. So I try to get my big-ass 40-foot RV back onto the highway from a dead stop.

I do a quick turnaround in a driveway, you know, like whipping this thing around like it's a sedan. And I head back to a friend's house where they had a driveway I knew we could work in. And Hadee and I just sort of sat down and decided we got to we got to solve this ourselves because every shop is closed. It's a Saturday. They won't let us in for months. We've already tried that. We knew this thing was starting to have problems. We tried to get it replaced weeks ago.

Oh, wow. Everybody's like, well, we could see a mid-June, early September. I'm like, no, no. So we just thought, you know what? We have got to do the work to replace this thing. So that's what we did in a driveway. Thankfully, we already had a spare pump. It was just a matter of getting it installed.

There you go. You got it. You got it. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Nic got it. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Nicely done. That'll be a lot easier. Now, I got to get back in that same spot.

Yeah. And then somehow fit the drill back in there. Oh, God. It's a tight fit. So we're trying to get a new pump installed that we thankfully already had, but didn't exactly plan to do it right now. And we're trying to improvise and get it installed, but it doesn't fit. Like, it's not the same size. And so, well, we're coming up with solutions on the fly, as they say.

No time like the present. We did, ultimately. We got it installed. What? Nicely done. I think the best moment was we had all the tools and we'd already owned the pump,

so we had that. So we were really, it was just a matter of finding a way to plug up the tank so that way the tank didn't completely drain the remainder all over us while we were swapping.

And so you could actually do the work? Yeah, right. And we had just the right sized cap that just perfectly plugged that hose so it was for something else like a random cap that was just around the rv yeah and it so it held the water back while we did the work so it was way less messy than we were expecting it and so ultimately we got it all put together and i think we got back on the road and ended up at the campsite in the woods probably earlier than if we would have made it to

oregon you know what i mean like if we'd stuck to the original plan so even with everything yeah that went wrong wow yeah and it's been a great time it's just a i didn't realize like oh i missed i miss going out to my favorite spot in the woods you know we got a good cell signal so we can still stay connected and it's springtime it's just it's fantastic. There's bears, there's elk, there's cows, there's bunnies, there's a river. And the water right now is crystal clear. Crystal clear river water, Wes. You can see the bottom of the river.

And just the right kind of temperatures too. It's not too hot, but you can get a little warm in the sun, but it's crisp outside. We probably spent, you know, three, four hours outside yesterday. Got a new grill that we set up. It turned out to be really, really nice. So I'm glad we did it. And it always is a great opportunity to think about things.

And one of the things that's on our minds right now is we are rebuilding the Jupiter Broadcasting website. And we have begun a conversation with the community in the new Office Hours podcast, officehours.hair. If you haven't checked that out yet, that's what was available. Officehours.hair. The episode where we kick this off is New Website Energy. Myself, Wes, Alex, and Brent sit down and we kick around our goals for the new website. But the great thing that happened, this is exactly what I was hoping would happen with Office Hours, is once we opened up the community, we started getting new ideas of stuff we never even considered, which could open up our production and some of our back end stuff to the community and help in a way I never even thought about until somebody suggested something. So that conversation is just kicking off on how we're going to rebuild the JB website, what features it's going to have.

If you want to participate in that, go check out episode three of officehours.hair and then join us for the next live stream. I'm doing these on Tuesdays as an opportunity for the community to get together and hang out, ask questions and suggest stuff. So join us on Tuesday the 10th at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

And we'll cover some of the feedback on that. See you in the office. See you in my office. Yeah, and there is a GitHub that Brent has set up that has conversations and threads going. Is there anything we need to let people know about that? Like where to go and stuff, Brent? Well, I think the best place to go

would just be the Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub. And we have a little like JupyterBroadcasting.com. What do you call them? Projects? I'm still new to this. Yeah, there's a repo, there's a project, and there's a discussion focused specifically around Office Hours Episode 3. Oh, thanks, Wes.

Yeah, and there's some great ideas being bounced around there. I've been, it's way better than Reddit. Go there instead. It's really great stuff. I want to talk about this new gaming snap that Canonical is very excited about. They write in the introduction, Canonical is going all in on the gaming experience on Ubuntu, and we've started building out a team dedicated to working on just that.

They have a call-out for testing on a new Steam Snap, which brings along everything you need to run Steam games via Proton, they write, or, of course, native Linux games. You and I both noticed, too, that at the Linux App Summit that was going on this weekend, Canonical was definitely mentioning the fact that they had open positions.

They mentioned it. Yes, very much so. Big QR codes up on their slides. Go apply here. Like, this is very exciting to see, right? It is a great idea. I am thrilled to see Canonical working on the desktop. At the same time, I'm just shaking my head.

Like they just had a round of really embarrassing social media coverage of their archaic hiring process. And then, of course, this announcement comes on the heels of everyone being really pissed off about the Firefox snap. And it just kind of kills all of the momentum and shine, in my opinion, of this announcement. Yeah, it's really, it's a complicated time to try to announce this and get the kind of response from the community that I'm sure they were hoping for that I'd like to see. Because yeah, right. I mean, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux desktop, especially around people who might, you know,

eventually want to try gaming on there. So it matters if we can make this default experience really good. It's just complicated. And our chat room's talking about it right now. You know, they're aware of these things. So here's what I think happens. I think Canonical lives within their own little echo chamber. And I think they tell themselves something kind of like this.

Well, Ubuntu has more desktop market share than all of the other distributions combined. So if we just ship something as default on Ubuntu, then by its very nature, it'll have millions of users. And it doesn't really matter if the chattering class online and in social media and on YouTube don't like it because these millions of quote unquote average users will just use the default quote unquote. And you see this pattern of thinking from canonical frequently. Sometimes it serves them. Sometimes it doesn't. I think in the case of the Firefox snap. Yeah, that's probably an accurate statement. I think in the case of gaming, they're kidding themselves. And it really shows how out of touch they are. First of all, Linux gamers are the exact type of user who's willing to use some crappy script

to optimize their system for better games. And if that script maybe replaces a snap with a flat pack or a deb, so that way their launch times are faster, they're going to do it. This is the enthusiast market. This is the kind of market where these things matter. And I think the other thing that shows how out of touch canonical is, especially with this particular crowd, is they did this out of the right, the wrong order. They did this out of order.

I think what they should have done is they should have got these, these positions filled first, get these people hired. Imagine, imagine applying for a job where the company is already two miles down the road on the project you're going to be working on. And so you just come on board and you're basically inheriting whatever they've already started, even if they don't have any insights or aren't, they aren't doing it right. And here's an example example not only did they launch this snap without everything complete for it to actually work properly but they clearly are not thinking beyond steam right there's no accounting for things like lutris or bottles which is another big part of the linux gaming ecosystem but they don't have any plans for that they maybe don't even know what those things are it's hard to tell it does kind of make me wonder like yes the focus purely on how do we address making gaming the best in whatever ways

are possible for our users or you know is it complicated by some of their own internal directives and things they're trying to accomplish it's like wait for these hires so that way these experts can give you an informed guidance on how to do this but also also get a W, bro. Get like a single W. Get a single win for snaps in this community's eyes. You know, we don't care if a snap of one package has 10x the users of a flat pack. None of us care. Get a W, bro. Get a win.

Fix the launch times. Fix the launch times. It's something you need to do anyways. Show us you're listening. Get a win fix the launch times fix the launch times it's something you need to do anyways show us you're listening get a win you get these people hired you help them inform the roadmap and you get a snap win and then you say by the way everybody we're now launching a gaming snap instead what they did is they've got this cart before the horse, before they've even made their hires. They've made this gaming Snap that wasn't even functional when it first launched. But thankfully, a former employee of theirs that was familiar with how Snaps work helped them realize the bits it was missing to actually function correctly.

You can find a link to that in our show notes. I think you can probably guess who one of those employees was. So they launched this incomplete product. They don't even have the staff on board. And then the other question is, why now? Why in 2022 when these things aren't in place? Why not three years ago before SteamOS 3 was created and they pivoted to Arch? Why do you care now? Do you care now because all of a sudden Valve has made something that's not based on Ubuntu and so this is a reactionary thing help me understand these things and this is my last point i think canonical doesn't have the way to properly advocate for this anymore these questions i'm asking

somebody savvy should have been out ahead of this laying the groundwork in the community that's how it used to happen. Strong community interaction. And because snaps face such a massive headwind from the community, they got to get out there because what's going to happen is there will be guides. There will be YouTubes. There will be forum posts. There will be links on Twitter

that tell you how to undo all of this work that they are going to invest multiple staff hours into. Lots of development time. And by the way, it's not Valve packaging this. It's not like they're building some great relationship with Valve either. They're packaging it outside of Valve. It's questionable if we even want that. So they're going to do all of this and they're going to put it out there. And then because the community hates what they create in 35 seconds, there will be scripts to replace and undo all of the work they've done. So I ask again, why are they doing it now this way? If this was something that they shoved down average quote unquote users throats and they didn't have any choice like Firefox,

yeah, it would work. But again, I argue the Linux gaming market is a little bit different. They're willing to install extensions that help set the performance governor on their PC. They understand what a performance governor is. Not all of them. But let's look at the people that are likely to game on Linux. If they can grok what Proton is and why they need Proton, then they can grok what a Bash script is. Is there a version of this where maybe that's not who Canonical thinks they're trying to target? Is it aimed more at the folks who know that Linux gaming is complicated,

kind of have heard of Proton but don't want to figure that out, and are willing to just hit, I want Steam from the snore, and then I'm going to try to play my games? Yeah, it's definitely probably going to be the majority of who ends up using it, right? Sort of a stem in the tide of those folks who might otherwise see themselves as being forced to go to something like Pop or Garuda. Here's what I think you end up with, though, is the worst of both worlds in that scenario. You end up, for Canonical, with just enough users where now you're forced to maintain this thing, but not enough users where you can exert any kind of influence. You know, there's no influence they can exert over Valve or the direction of any way this goes.

And now that Valve has their own platform to develop on, they don't even need anything from Canonical. So Canonical is always going to be chasing the developments on SteamOS now to try to bundle it up in a snap. And again, it just doesn't seem like they have the insights into the market. Like, what are they going to do about Lutris here? It's not a complete gaming picture. It's not a solution right now.

Are they going to include AMD drivers in the GUIs to manage AMD cards? What about NVIDIA stuff? Like, where does this go? I suppose I love the idea if snaps were better received and launched faster. Then I'm like, this is a pretty solid idea. At least there is a real good solution for users of the Ubuntu desktop. However, I'd also feel a lot better if it was being created and packaged

and maintained by Valve. You know, wouldn't this be the great solution? Like, here's a solution for Ubuntu users. It's like the blessed SteamOS environment all in a snap. Or at least we felt like there was some involvement, some handshake or some, you know, co-press release, something to say like, oh, we're excited to see better support on Ubuntu or, you know, co-press release, something to say like, oh,

we're excited to see better support on Ubuntu or, you know, something that made you feel like it wasn't just a totally total canonical move in a vacuum. Yeah. I hope that this turns out at least somewhat positive for them, because like I said at the start of this, it is exciting to see them put any effort like this and hire like this for a desktop project yeah i mean hiring you know headcount that that is that means money so you're right it is exciting it's just interesting that this is where they're doing that investment and not investing to where the puck is skating right this is now a solved problem in part because some opportunity was missed and valve switched to Arch.

It's not really the problem we need solved now. I mean, gaming on Linux could always be better, but it's better than it ever has been. Wouldn't it be great if they were launching a strike team to solve another problem on the Linux desktop that wasn't as well off as gaming was right now? It also seems like there's other problems that maybe they could address in a way that, you know, they would have some particular leverage in.

Yeah. And, you know, I could come up with a list right off the top of my head. You know, things from like pipewire to fonts to printing. You know, there's so many areas that we could just really nail for the end user. But what we're going to solve is Linux gaming, which is already a small niche of the Linux market and is already being directly addressed by the primary vendor in the ecosystem. And then you just add something like Lutris and bottles, and you're pretty much good to go.

I struggle with it, but I'm open to feedback on this. Send us a boost or go to linuxunplugged.com contact. I do feel like we should probably give it a try. Maybe it's not quite yet ready, but a little bit down the line when it's made a little more generally available. I'll be curious, you know, I do end up gaming on Pop at the moment in a fair bit. And while I still think I would, you know,

kind of like what Pop's been doing lately, so I might be inclined to install it anyway. If I could go, you know, just install the latest Ubuntu, couple of clicks in the store and have Steam up and going, there is something valuable that, or if I'm trying to convince, say, my brother to finally get off his Windows desktop for gaming, maybe. But I don't know. That's a long road and it needs to launch decently.

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. That's right. That's how it works. Linode started in 2003 because they saw that Linux had this great thing coming called virtualization. What a concept. And now 19 years later, they have built one of the absolute best platforms for developers, Linux enthusiasts, businesses, and your everyday users. And I make that qualification because if you just want to run a personal portfolio, they have $5 a month systems. Make that qualification because if you just want to run a personal portfolio, they have $5 a month systems. You want to run your own Mumblebox or maybe your own Jitsi or GitLab now, especially with GitLab making some pricing changes. In fact, Linode has one-click GitLab deployments, which are really, really handy.

But really, at the end of the day, Lin deploy some just absolutely bananas infrastructure that can scale up to millions of users or at least one busy Synapse server, you absolutely can do that too. They just have the best in class experience and performance and customer support. There's a lot of places that offer hosting, but nobody gets the mix right like Linode does. And then you add that $100 offer. It's just a great way to try it out and support the show. They got all the distributions you're going to want to try. Like they've already got 2204 up there if you want to give that a go. They're always rolling out the new almas when those are

ready to go. We run Nextcloud up there like a freaking champ dude. It's excellent. It is the best most reliable implementation I've ever had of NextCloud. And I'm going to admit, part of that is we're using the object storage that Linode has as our back-end storage. And that's been a game changer for us.

But now we're looking at like all kinds of things that we might want to use for internal tools, like a Mattermost server, a Jitsi replacement. And we can just run it all in the same box because these things are so fast. They got NVMe storage. They got Epic processors when you go to the high-end CPU ones, but they also do have high-end GPU systems. It's like great, man. And the interface is so slick that you can work with any of it. And then once you've been using it for a while, you start using things like the command line tool and the API, and it's just total fire. I absolutely love it. And it's so nice to just get in, get out, get things done super quick, spin things up and try it out, decide if we want to use it or not, then destroy the box. I love it. And it's so nice to just get in, get out, get things done super quick, spin things up and try it out, decide if we want to use it or not,

then destroy the box. I use it for that kind of thing all the time. Go try it. Go learn something. Support the show. It's super quick to get started, so do it right now by going to linode.com slash unplugged and get that $100 credit and you support the show. It's linode.com slash unplugged.

I thought it'd be fun if we busted out that old Linux time machine. Unplugged. Oh, well, here we are back in the late 90s. So if I had a Linux time machine, which, of course, I do, obviously, we just used it. It's called ZFS. Yeah, it's a time snapshot. I like that. That's what we should have gone with. I was thinking about this. Like, if I was to look back, like, did I ever make a choice that kind of sent me off on a tangent for the wrong time or something like that?

I was to look back, like, did I ever make a choice that kind of sent me off on a tangent for the wrong time or something like that? And I think maybe I probably focused too much on the desktop. And I know that sounds weird because I love the desktop, but the server side of Linux is like infinitely, it's like infinite jobs. There's so many jobs if you learn the Linux side, there's so many things you can build. It's like the equivalent of learning learn the Linux side. There's so many things you can build. It's like the equivalent of learning how to develop software. You can really build and create things when you learn the server side. And not that I haven't, but I think maybe that would have made me more inclined to look at things like Nix sooner and stuff like that. It's been around for a decade, and I'm just now getting to it. So I was looking at that, like, why did it take me so long?

But you have tried pretty much every desktop environment known to humankind. Exactly. So I think I did a lot of jumping around with the desktop, fooling around with my desktop. When I look back at it,

it sort of feels like wasted time, but I don't really know for sure. Maybe it was, maybe it was necessary. I mean, I sure managed to turn into a lot of content, but I think overall, it probably wasn't the most efficient use of my time. I had a lot of fun, though, so I could still make an argument for it, but I would tweak that. Yeah, I think that's probably I was going to say less distro hopping, but that was also kind of essential for the show.

So for me, it would have been fine. I would like sit down with my younger self and I'd say, here's the state of affairs, man. I know this is all looking really good. But then like in a few years, there's going to be this fork in the road where this thing called unity comes out and this KDE goes to like KDE 4. And that's going to be real rough. And then like GNOME, you're not even going to believe what the GNOME folks do. And I'm going to say GNOME, you mean GNOME? No, no, we call it GNOME now.

Oh, I'm going to say it's weird, but you're going to just brace yourself because that's just the very beginning, right? And just keep your head down and build and don't get distracted by all that. I'm imagining you trying to explain also the rise of like mobile. Right. And being like, well, okay, so Linux is on the phone, but not in a way that your future self is going to like at all. It's a complicated future and the desktop isn't as relevant as you really think it's going to be. That is, I think, the key piece to this. And I'm really glad you just put words to that is that's the other bit I'd have to say to myself. It's like the worst part is it's not going to really matter.

Like by the time you get to like the 2020s, you could use any distro or really any operating system. And all of your tools pretty much work because everything's going to be in the web. And I'm going to be like, what? I hate web apps. I'm like, no, you still will. You absolutely, that will not change. Yes, you still hate web apps, but everything's in a web browser now. Pluses and minuses, right? It's really, it's really kind of weird. But you know, I would also like, I know to tell myself about things like process namespaces and containers and, and just honestly, the thing that still blows my mind the most from back then to today is just how radically available server resources are. And if you weren't around in the early nineties and the early aughts and deploying servers, you really don't

understand like to even get a server going well there was an approval process there's a hardware purchase that has to happen which means you have to work with a vendor and a sales rep and then they spec you something you go back and forth on that for a couple of days and then you order it and then like weeks go by and depending on the vendor like sometimes the machine back then didn't even show up assembled the parts would arrive separately and then you order it and then like weeks go by. And depending on the vendor, like sometimes the machine back then didn't even show up assembled. The parts would arrive separately and then you still had to assemble it all together back then. And then you had to like install rails and you had to go put it into a rack.

And these things are heavy. It's like they made them out of cement. And then you had to like wire all up and manage the wiring and provision the switch port. Right. Do you get where I'm going with this? It's like a multi-month process. And then if you were in somebody else's data center, you not only paid for your bandwidth,

the actual amount of bandwidth that you used, but you actually paid for the power, all of it. Like, so like, oh yeah, screw you if you accidentally messed up the backup system and all the systems do an extra backup that night, you just totally killed your budget. It was ridiculous. And now I can spin up servers

via an API on the command line. And it's up on this infrastructure that's way more powerful than anything I'd ever have access to. Right. And we can like customize it to run around kernels, switch it over to NixOS. It's not like the old days of shared hosting either. Yeah. And I think so too.

I don't know how I'd even relay it to my younger self, but, you know. Can you, like, give yourself an SSH session that, like, goes forward in time? Yeah, a tunnel through time. That would be pretty rad, actually. If I ever figure that out. Just go check out, like, you know, have your past self check out our Matrix box. He'd be very impressed by the Matrix server. That would be.

All right, let's bring it back to the present. Very impressed by the matrix server. That would be. All right, let's bring it back to the present. So it was actually Brent who discovered the Linux time machine and dusted it off and said, guys, we got to go back in time and save our former selves. And I said, Brent, if we go back in time, we're going to undo the shows. Right. Because you never know what could happen. And Brent, you're the one that is explaining.

We're actually just forking the universe. So it's just an alternate reality that's getting all messed up. Yeah, it's fine. There are infinite possibilities anyways, right, guys? Yeah. So we're just altering one of those infinite possibilities. Are you ready to go back in time to your former Linux self, Brent? Sure. You know, my younger Linux self didn't actually grasp onto Linux as soon as I would hope I would have. So me, you know, the me Linux guy now, I think sees that I dabbled in Linux quite a lot before really grabbing onto it. Many years before I switched my entire business to open source stuff, I was playing with this stuff and just as kind of a curiosity, but never really latched on. And I wish, I think that I would have said, no, no, grab this right now. If you do, it'll really change things for you. You know, don't wait the, I don't know, eight or seven years down the road to do it and do it right away. And, um, who knows where that could have led a Brent

these days. I mean, I think I'm fine with who I am now, but just imagine you could graph some of those technologies, maybe eight years sooner, maybe Chris, I'd be almost as experienced or as you or Wes perhaps. And so that being said, I wish that I also latched onto those communities a little sooner at the same time. So I'm just thinking going to Linux Fest Northwest really made things flourish for me in terms of meeting people, like-minded people. And so I think the theme for me is just doing it a little bit sooner. Do you think there's anything that might have, you know, some hurdles you might have to help your old self overcome? I'm just thinking maybe, you know, if you were starting, you know, more of your photography journey back then,

the tooling probably wasn't quite as good as it is on modern desktop Linux amongst a ton of other things. And I imagine there were probably reasons at the time that maybe you didn't, didn't dive in right away. I think part of it was complexity, actually. Now that I think about it back then with dependency issues, you know, I ran into those almost immediately when I was trying to install some software and even, you know, installing it the way that was intended. Do you remember those days of sort of the so-called dependency hell? Hmm. That's, it made me hate RPM back in the day. You know, you're, you of sort of the so-called dependency hell? That's, it made me hate RPM back in the day. You know, you're, you're kind of, I feel like,

I feel like you're looking back at your younger self. I'm, you know, thanks for bringing us along in the time machine. And you know what I'm seeing as I look around your room here, Brent, I'm seeing like a lot going on and I'm not seeing a particular problem you had to solve with Linux. And I think that's something you gotta, you gotta be kind of, you can't be so hard on yourself about. Like, you didn't really have something you needed Linux to fix until it was time and then you switched. And when we as a community think about advocacy and we think about trying to get other people to switch to Linux, I think we have to understand and realize that a lot of times people don't necessarily feel a need and they don't see a reason because everything's working fine. Everything is just, they sort of have, they have the, they have, they have it good. And it's, for me, the problems I needed solving dealt directly with server scaling in the late 90s

that was just a limit of like the Windows technology stack back then. And so I went looking somewhere else to handle the user load that I was trying to deal with. And so I discovered Linux that way. And so a similar thing, like my very, very first use with Linux, besides the time I deleted my file system,

so my second use with Linux. My first successful time with Linux. Was Microsoft had my school, I was in high school at the time, they had us pinned down and they were bullying my school. And I've shared the story before. And they didn't have a product that would solve the really serious networking issues that we were having. And Squid Proxy did. And so I set up a Debian box and I set up Squid Proxy. And it was incredible. And I remember thinking, wow, they can't even do this. And so I set up a Debian box and I set up Squid Proxy and it was incredible. And I remember thinking, wow, they can't even do this.

And so Microsoft, sort of a short aside, Microsoft came while we're back in time. They came at us because we had a special program with them. And they said, you basically have an ultimate. They gave us an ultimatum and they said, you either try out this Windows NT 5 beta thing and see if you can use the new proxy server that we have in that. They hadn't even named it Windows 2000 at this point. That's how long ago this was. So we want you to try out this new NT 5 beta and see if that doesn't solve the problem for you.

And of course it didn't. And so, you know, also we weren't going to deploy beta software. For our whole network, for your whole production network. It was crazy. So, you know, Brent, I weren't going to deploy beta software for our whole network, for your whole production network. It was crazy. So, you know, Brent, I had a problem to solve and I had a serious like emergency problem to solve. And Windows, we took it to as far as we could before we ended up looking for somewhere else. For me, that was like, you know, 98, 99. But for you, it was just a different time where you had a problem to solve.

Right. I mean, I'm looking around. I don't think you should be so hard on yourself. I can understand. I think that's actually a really good point. When I did have a problem to solve, right? I mean, I'm looking around. I don't think you should be so hard on yourself. I can understand. I think that's actually a really good point. When I did have a problem to solve and it was the clear solution, it was very easy to just dive right in. So I wonder then if we could turn the time machine dial a little more, maybe closer to the present, and I can present just a little something else. to the present and I can present just a little something else. Woo! Was that a hand? That felt like a hand. It's close quarters in this time machine. It's only meant for one. Oh, I love this thing anyways, though. It's great. You know, one thing I've been

thinking about lately is I wonder if my slightly younger self would want to learn different things. It feels to me like my self-learning journey, at least around sort of like sysadmin-y topics, you know, like SSH-ing and doing key pairs and trying to run a Jellyfin server and all of these things, it has been at least very easy for me to find the sort of, don't insulted anyone but i'll call them the old linux way of setting these up you know like not containers like installing a package or maybe even running an install script app to get or something yeah yeah yeah you see like tons of tutorials tons of them with how to do things that way and i wish maybe and'm, I'm willing to, you know, discuss this as well. I wish that maybe someone would have said, Hey, by the way, there are these new ways of doing this stuff that

maybe is a better way to go. Cause, um, perhaps that's a better investment of your time, you know, containers and infrastructure as code and all these great, you know, the Nixie kind of stuff we're playing with. I kind of wish I had been introduced to that way sooner. I think that's probably a common feeling. But on the flip side, have you been pretty well served by the existing resources? I'm just thinking, you know, it's kind of amazing these days,

especially you got a reliable VPS, you apt to get install a couple, you know, you got your Nginx web server, you got your program running. As many things as you might want to do differently and there are many additional patterns like that it sure does just work especially if you only got a couple things to manage it's certainly well tested right yeah you could build a career out of it i think it's served me well but only in that i don't know what i've been missing out on well i mean you're still young really if you think about it you know if you think about it on that time scale, when you're 50 years old, you're going to have

this stuff under your belt for decades. I assume Alex has got you setting up open shift clusters already. Oh, man. We better get him out of there. We better get him out of there. It's going to be bad. So, are you ready? Do you want to take the wheel on the time machine? Just be careful.

When Brent drives, he adjusts the seat. Oh, I've driven with Brent before. Where are we, Wes? I'm noticing kind of a different style of clothing. Well, you might notice different animals around here, too. It's been a long time. Yeah, yeah. All right.

Tell us where we're at. Well, I figured we'd go back into a world where Wes had free time. Oh, yes. You know, remember those days? Yeah, back when I used to play with Gentoo. So that's what I want to talk about. You said something earlier. You said something about distro hopping.

Yeah. You know, I kind of wish I distro hopped less. I think the opposite. I wish that I had spent more time distro hopping. Because thinking back on it, like some of the late nights where I was, you know, first figured out how to install Arch Linux. And before I had like, you know, you know, I had like one netbook and not, you know, not a lot of fancy computer peripherals or networks or options besides the instructions I'd written down from my working installation to get this going. And just for also a little bit of context, what kind of internet speeds would you say we're looking at back then? You know, not great.

Yeah. Early DSL maybe? Yeah. And I learned so much and that was the right time when I was really first kind of getting all the ways you could put a Linux system together. But I think that would have been a good time to really

go deep into Gen 2 or bother to do Linux from scratch. Not that you have to, not that I feel like I'm missing out by not having done it. And you know, there's, there's a lot going on about a Linux system and I don't need to be an expert in, but I'd like to do those things now. And that's one, one reason I've really enjoyed this NixOS challenge is it felt like an excuse to kind of dabble a bit more, but there's just too many things to learn besides technology we want to deploy for, you know, to improve the shows for work, for my own hobbies. Like there's just,

there's just not that much room. And because I'm so used to like, you know, to improve the shows, for work, for my own hobbies. Like there's just, there's just not that much room. And because I'm so used to like, you know, I know my way around enough distros now. That's just never on the top of my thing to try, unfortunately. So you'd, you'd, uh, you'd go over there and you'd tap yourself, your former self on the shoulder and you'd go, go try out Gen 2 for a while. Go distro hop a bit. Yeah. You know, it's time.

While you got the time. Slackware. Right. You go, uh, you know, go spread your, your distro hopping days days out while you can now because your time is going to be limited down the road. I definitely get where you're coming from because I had years of experience with Red Hat based systems and Debian based, well, Debian, before I tried Gen 2. And I felt like I finally learned Linux when I started building my Gen 2 systems. And I felt like I finally learned Linux when I started building my Gen 2 systems because of the way I had to do the partitioning, the way I had to do the formatting, the way I had to bless the bootloader and install the bootloader. All the stuff that the installers had always been doing for me since day one, including back then you had to configure Xorg files.

Oh, yeah, right. And, you know, a lot of distributions where they added value was in the installer and maybe walking you through setting up X and walking you through setting up your hardware interfaces and stuff like that. Whereas in Gen 2, depending on what stage you did, and I normally did a stage two install, you had to learn all that. And that's really when I started to get it, I think. And so I agree, you know. Maybe you're suddenly seeing like the config options for the kernel for the first time. And you're like, oh yeah, I can tweak these. Yeah, you know, that is a great point is you really learning how you put the whole kernel together

and how you, you know, you move that, you create that image and you, you know, you move things around and like just- Picking new modules you want built in or just available on the side. Even understanding what the difference between having it built in and having as a module was like a huge thing for me. Like, oh, right. That's OK.

I mean, I knew about kernel modules, but you really got your, you know, the great thing is you still could do that. You still could, you know. So I say, you know what we ought to do? Well, here, let's go forward. Good. Indoor plumbing once forward. Good. Indoor plumbing once again. Wow. We really went back.

I got to say, though, I mean, it's not like you – we don't sit down and get to working and we never go, geez, I sure wish Wes knew how to use Linux better. I don't think that's ever been a problem. So you've managed. You've managed just fine. I suppose so. You did fine. And there's, you know, I'm sure there'll be future challenges on the show. We'll see what

weird distros we can cook up. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Get started with a free trial of Teams or Enterprise Planet. Bitwarden.com slash Linux or try it for free as an individual user. You are talking to some Bitwarden users right here on the show. I love it as an individual user,

but then it really took it to the next level and we started using it as a business for JB. You can use it to share and sync your sensitive data. It's not just passwords. I have other information in there, including things like some of the different shipping endpoints for sending stuff to the host or authentication two-factor codes,

phrases, like some of my software requires recovery phrases like element. I'll store that in there. It's just a nice spot to have all of that. And yeah, peace of mind knowing that Bitwarden is open source. It's already trusted by millions of individuals. There's teams out there using it. There is a large community that's also practicing self-hosting the Bitwarden stuff. So you always have that as an option. I've opted to go for Bitwarden Cloud. I don't know if I must've asked you, but I've forgotten. Wes, do you use Bitwarden Cloud? Are you using local hosting? You know, I've done both right now. I'm using the cloud as well. I love that there's the self-hosted option, but I also like that, you know, I felt the price is super reasonable. So it's sort of like, it's a way that

I can fund development and I don't have, you know, just one less thing I have to personally host. But I know if I wanted to, I'd have the option. Well, check this out. New feature landing right now. I think you're going to love this. And I can't believe I never thought about this. They're now adding a username generator. Oh, that's clever.

Right? I mean, they've already got that handy password generator. So why not take it to the next level? Right. And I don't need the same username. I out of habit use like the same two usernames everywhere. But do you care, especially on like, you know, just the random accounts that you have to have, like for like banking stuff or like health site login stuff for like the health plan for Washington. Like, why am I using my NICs that I use on like public places there? That's ridiculous. Because I don't want to have to think

of a username all the time. It's like what we used to do with passwords. I never even thought about it. And like, you think about it now, like, isn't that way better, say if some service does get compromised and their username and password database leaks, if you're using a random password

and a random username stored in Bitwarden for that, like you're fine. Yeah, that seems. It's a total non-issue. Even you decide. I love that they're adding that. And if you, this is also really cool.

The generator offers an option for creating a random plus email address. If your service supports that. So like Gmail, you know, like username plus your actual email at gmail.com. That's super handy. Yeah. They'll fill that in for the,

what I know they must have some logic in there that figures out. It's so great. They're adding stuff all the time, too. And it's nice just knowing that you have that kind of security hygiene. So go try it out and support the show. It's easy to get started by going to Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Use it for yourself, use it for your business or maybe the open source project you're working with. Go try it out and support the show. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Many of you wrote in this week with feedback. Thank you very much. We got a few on the topic of the generic ARM Linux images

that we had, I say talk about, but it was a micro rant I think that Chris might've slipped into. Michael wrote in and suggests, the problem is that there's no such thing as a generic ARM system, at least in the same sense as x86. Every ARM device has its own bootloader system, device tree, and proprietary drivers and blobs. As an example of how crazy and non-standard things are on ARM, the Raspberry Pi actually uses the GPU to run the bootloader. This is why all you can find are images for the Pi or for individual SoCs like the PINE64. Among ARM devices, there's no such thing as standardized UEFI boot systems, for example, and no standard way to boot from a USB stick. In my mind, these are the reasons

ARM has really not made much progress in the desktop and laptop computer space outside of Apple. I want to love ARM and I want it to succeed and be everywhere I really do, but not until some basic standardization occurs and we can get generic Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. for ARM that can boot on all laptops and desktops. This is a grade A email. Grade A. Michael nails the problem. But Michael overlooks one thing. There is a standard generic ARM system, and it's virtualized ARM. And it's becoming super common because more and more ARM boards are capable of virtualization. And additionally, every MacBook M1 or iMac M1 user out there now has access to creating generic ARM machines.

And it is super common to virtualize Linux on the macOS desktop for all kinds of development reasons and other reasons. And when these projects only release Raspberry Pi images, like our friends at Ubuntu Mate or our friends at Home Assistant, then these new M1 virtualization platforms, which are fantastic virtualization machines, for example, Parallels 17 on macOS on the M1 supports Vert GPU pass-through. So you get a full OpenGL accelerated virtualization experience. So it's using that

Vert.io pass-through driver with Parallel 17 to talk to Metal. So the actual Linux desktop is rendered on the Mac client side using the local Metal API, but on the back side is passing through

the virtual card GPU acceleration stuff. It's a great experience. And the fact that we're not releasing ARM images for general ARM virtualization means that a bunch of like CI test flows are not possible. And everyone who's on one of these M1 chips can't virtualize that project.

And I would love to just see projects just target that, like OpenSUSE has one of these, Fedora has one of these. There are projects out there that just release these generic ARM ISOs, and they're not image files. We're not flashing to an SD card like a child's toy, right? They're ISO files, and we're installing them like a desktop operating system. And it makes a difference. It is a micro-ramp, but it matters.

And the ARM platform is becoming more and more prevalent now thanks to in part chrome os and apple but ultimately what michael is touching on here where there's like all these different arm boards and systems and you require all these special kernel drivers and stuff it is a mess yeah right and now so suddenly now this more generic virtualized one is just one more yeah Yeah, it totally is. And this is why we have followed RISC-V with interest, because it would be so nice to solve this problem. ARM is not the hero we have been looking for, but it may be the hero we end up getting stuck with because of just the industry support around it. Because you got to understand like that scale of manufacturing means that there is just a ton of ARM boards out there, a ton of ARM code out there. It's kind of like got momentum, as they say. And now it is time for the boost.

Marcel boosted in with a thousand sats with a great question. If Firefox is open source, how can Mozilla oblige anyone to distribute it in a particular way? It's a great question. Probably something we should have talked about. So last episode, it came up that Firefox is a snap and it is something that was worked out between Mozilla and Canonical at Mozilla's request. And people were just kind of discovering this as a thing

as they upgraded to the new LTS, even though it's been a thing for a minute. Does anybody here know why that is the case? I have a guess. I don't know for sure, but I have a pretty strong guess. Some about redistributing trademarks, et cetera? desktop, then they need to follow the wishes of the trademark and copyright owner. And this is just how sometimes U.S. law is enforced to maintain the rights of free software for better or worse. Sometimes we use it to our advantage, right?

The GPL is copy left. It's Richard Stallman's troll of copyright law, basically. He's using copyright law to protect free software. It's actually very brilliant. But the other side is you can also use it to dictate terms. That's why some distros ship things like Ice Weasel

and stuff like that. Nivolu boosts in with 100 sats. Imagine if Valve chose to use NixOS for the Steam Deck instead of Arch. I'm curious about the rabbit hole of discussion we could truly go down when pondering this question. Will Valve gain some benefits

from using NixOS instead of Arch? Or is Arch a better option just due to how familiar the community is with it? This is a great question. Nev, that is, I wonder, right? Part of you wonders, do they just not know? Is there just not enough people out there talking about how they use Nix?

But I think ultimately from Valve, tell me what you think, Wes, but I think it all came from we want upstream drivers and code as fast as possible. And when you ask that question to the Linux community, the answer is Arch, right? Yeah. And I mean, I guess it kind of depends on what they're comfortable with, what their engineers want to work with. And then, I mean, I can see, you know, obviously there's a lot of benefits to NixOS, especially for the system aspect. But once you get to the Steam piece, less so, right? Like that's all going to be outside of the build system and any of that anyway. They could totally have a repo. I mean, like they could totally make it work with Nix, but you're right. Like once you get to the Steam client, the desktop stuff, Proton.

And maybe, I mean, you know, I'm not saying that if you did go full Nix with that stuff, that there wouldn't be benefits. I'm sure there would be. But just is that a realistic goal to add on or would it be sort of a hodgepodge? And then if they're not doing that much with the base system to start with, maybe there's not that wasn't the biggest concern. And here's a wild idea. What about developers, right? You want a system that is approachable by developers. And I think we all

remember that during the Steam Deck developer period, Valve said, well, if you can't get your hands on a Steam Deck, here is a machine that

specs similar. Just install Manjaro. That's not as easy with NixOS. There's no Manjaro for NixOS. And that might play

a role as well as the developer story here. But it would have meant that Valve didn't have to concoct their whole imaging read-only file system solution that they've kind of bolted on top of Arch. All of that, you just get that kind of reliability with Nix. It does maybe. I suppose perhaps the Flatpak setup could work in a similar way. It does maybe make it a little more friendly for tinkering.

Our next boost came in from Exception, or something like that. That's a pretty clever username. Just my two cents about real-time patches for Linux, because we talked about Ubuntu 22.04, including real-time patches of Linux with their Ubuntu Advantage service. But Exception

writes, turns out that Linux is not really a real-time OS. We can make the OS okay for real-time operations with the ability of certain latency deadlines with these real-time patches. You see, I'm from a generation where we were told that an OS must be designed from the ground up for real time. I remember that thinking too, actually. In fact, I, until recently, thought that was how it still was. But exception goes on to say, but we built Linux so that it was flexible, so that it could be adapted like no OS before it

for all sorts of purposes, embedded Android server, and we found a way to make it work with Linux. Truly, open source is the way. That's great. That's a great point. That now because of Linux's open nature, a company could come along and create these real-time patches who was just recently acquired by Intel and essentially create these latency deadlines. Wes, you had a really good explanation recently of how Linux is real-time or isn't real-time. Do you recall what it was?

Well, I mean, I think there is still some points here that you might not use it for all tasks, right? But it is adding this ability to the kernel to approach stuff with more deterministic deadlines so that you, you know, you do have a little more guarantees that the task that you need to have happen can happen within a set boundary. And that is kind of the key of it, right? It's that this task will execute within this guaranteed window of time. Yeah, because on a non-real-time system, you might have some unpredictable latency that even if it only happens, you know, a tiny percentage of the time, it could mean that your safety check for some industrial machine didn't happen within those tight time frames. And so you can, you know, with a real-time kernel, you're often trading some kind of overall throughput for the system to keep things within that boundary.

So, you know, the system will predictably keep taking on. And this conversation really came up on this show when we had Tim on from JPL and he was talking about how the Linux copter is a real-time kernel because of these reasons that you just outlined. And so Exception wanted to write in and just kind of point out that like when we talk about real-time, that's actually what we're talking about. That's how it works. It's sort of these guarantees that within a certain window of latency of time, this task will execute.

And when you're in an industrial application, that's absolutely necessary. And it's neat because, like, I think there still are specific real-time operating systems for stuff where that's really important or you need to build on that base. This just opens up, you know, for maybe the top tier of those things. That's a category Linux can play in now. We got a double boost from Nev this week. Nev wrote in, I would like to interject for a moment and comment that this podcast does not contain any mention of Gen 2 nor Emacs.

We fixed that this week, at least. As such, I publicly challenge the next person who sends Sats to JB to install Gen 2 Linux and daily drive it for one week. If they can prove, I will directly send them 5,000 sats with JB getting an additional 5,000 sats and giving them the right to declare the next boost challenge.

A boost challenge. Boost challenge, wow. Boost challenge declared by now. So you got to run Gen 2 for a week. And I think to make this work, you probably have to have, it has to be a new install of Gen 2. You can't like, think to make this work, you probably have to have it. It has to be a new install of Gen 2.

You can't like because, you know, if you're already using it, that doesn't count. You know, there's like five guys listening right now. They're like, crap. But you got to have a new install. And if you can prove it, I don't know what you take a picture of your computer with the newspaper. I don't know how you prove it. You come up with something. You start it with a screenshot with the New York Times up and you end it with a screenshot with the New York Times up. I don't know.

I don't know. It's, you know, it's like you got your terminal going with a. Yeah. Like, like. OS release. And then you got like the front page of Hacker News. Yeah. Okay.

And you do it for a week. You send and you send us some boosts proving it. And then Nev will send you 5,000 sats and send us 5,000 sats. And then we get to declare a boost challenge. Which that's i'm looking forward to i got all kinds i like i like it's a weird mix of like an npr style fundraiser but also uh like the ice bucket challenge from your spec so i don't know what's going on but i support it boost degree also just want to mention uh that you can essentially send me a pm via boost like NorCal Linux dad did. He sent me just a little FYI. So I know about something going on with the upcoming event and he knew it'd be right

in front of my face. And as I start rethinking how I want to have myself available, I think it's going to be the contact form and boosts are going to be like the top two ways to get messages in. So you can send a direct message to me as a boost as well. And you can actually use, there's these URLs you can use now. It's pretty cool. We're going to go into, there's all kinds of stuff going on in podcasting,

including some new standards that are rolling out. Ooh, a new cool backend technology that's happening. Also a super awesome way to, something I want to talk about after the show, super awesome way to generate RSS feeds, all of that. So we're covering some of those podcasting developments in office hours now to kind of keep it out of the show so we can stay focused on the Linux here. There's enough going on. But it is such an interesting time. There is some really awesome new stuff being developed.

And when you hear it, you're like, wow, how have we not had this stuff in podcasting before? Like podcasting just sort of sat around for a decade and really did nothing new. But podcasting 2.0 has a lot of really cool new features. And I've been playing around with systems to help us generate transcripts because that's one of them. Oh, yeah. Yeah. See, I can just get going forever. Anyways, we'll put in office hours from time to time. So go check that out at officehours.hair. But if you want more of this show, you can become a member either with the whole network and all of the shows and all of their bonus features at jupiter.party or you can become an unplugged core contributor at unpluggedcore.com and sign up as a member and you get access to

two different options two different perks but by far by like a huge margin like by 90 the preference is the live stream i could basically stop even mentioning that we have a ad free version. People do not care. They want the live stream version. That's the one everybody wants. Uh, and that's, you know, we, we try to make a lot of extra content in the pre and post show. And you get to hear like, if we stopped for a pee break and Wes and Brent just, uh, you know, chew up the, the, you know, the chat. So that's unplugged core.com where you can support the entire network at jupiter.party. The whole thing is if you get a little value from the show from time to time or frequently, that's another way you can contribute back. But another way is to join us live. We do the show

on Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Send us an email. That's also a great way to contribute some value is give us some feedback, maybe give us an idea, make a contact, or we really appreciate it when you spread the word about the show. That's a great way to really contribute some value back because who wants to listen to a podcast just cold? The podcast you want to listen to are the ones you get told about. Yeah, you know, put it on a speaker outside your house all day. Maybe you get driving someone in the car for an unrelated reason. Throw Linux Unplugged on.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Oh yeah, of course. Of course. We should mention too, the companion show, linuxactionnews.com. Lots going on every single week. Wes and I break it down at linuxactionnews.com. Links to what we talked about today in this here show at linuxunplugged.com slash four, five, six. You know, we should mention Linux Action News is going to be out a little bit late this week. You're right. Just a little bit, so.

A little bit of a delay. Just wait. Yeah, just subscribe. There's always the all shows feed, and you just get everything. Like Office Hours, like Linux Action News, and this show. Anyways, that wraps it up for us. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. See you right back here next week. Tiny made a good point in the mumble room, too.

Another perk for Valve going with, say, Arch over Nix is the community has just built a lot of tooling already. There's a lot there for them to just leverage immediately. It's a solid point. And, of course, Valve would want to take advantage of that. Although, I suppose, as Kukuf mentioned in the IRC... What was that? I'm sorry? You heard me.

I mean, Nix would probably be pretty great at generating that read-only image. That was my point. It's like a lot of the work they did to make Arch consumable by consumers, they would have just inherited with Nix. And then they could just set up a few repos and add a couple of lines

to the config and good to go. And they basically have their own custom OS. That's what's so slick about it. We got some other really good feedback on the ARM stuff.

We just didn't have a chance to fit it in the main show. But Paul wrote in, I think it was Paul, right? We hit a nerve in the ARM stuff. We just didn't have a chance to fit it in the main show. But Paul wrote in, I think it was Paul, right? We hit a nerve in the ARM, I could say. You're right. You could say that. He writes, when ARM-based platforms became a thing in the Linux world,

nothing told the OS what processor it ran on or which peripherals were connected. And he goes on to talk about how it was just such a mess early on. And it got old, and we needed device tree configurations. We had to create that. There had to be all of this work. And he says, now these days we've sort of figured it out and we don't need separate kernels.

But back then, one of the ways they were doing this was, you know, different kernels for different ARM devices. And we forget it wasn't really that long ago. It is getting a lot better now. And we are seeing a lot more support for at least the Raspberry Pi side. Paul makes a good point there. Well, we've seen all the trouble and Project Treble over in the Android world. And he says it's still not great, right? He's like, you know, you look at it today, it's still pretty difficult to support the different boards with the same kernel because often there are patches that can kind of conflict with each other to enable.

Yeah, you can see that, too, if they have custom video cards or usb buses or network adapters i feel like it's especially painful because we're always following up on what's coming out in the latest kernel and then you know on those devices you're stuck with like whatever probably a lts kernel or something that they've chosen to hopefully that they've chosen to build for you yeah this is why ultimately you just hear us talk more about the Pi on here because, you know, that all works now. That's all upstream in the kernel. It all works now in the kernel. And that's a big deal. That's that's when I say ecosystem, that's kind of what I'm talking about. It's going to be Pis and Mac minis.