LINUX Unplugged - 461: Deep in the Tumbleweeds

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Three tails of tech tribulations, and how Brent saved his openSUSE Tumbleweed box from the brink.

Very impressed that they've got Linux running on the iPad Air 2. You knew it would happen, right? But this is Linux 5.18. So this is like the most recent version. And another group then built on that work and got Linux booting on the iPhone 5S. That's so crazy. It is really great. When you start seeing things like from the GNOME project, like they're working on mobile.

My first reaction when I saw this was like, oh, here we go again. GNOME's focused on mobile again. Well, we all know how this is going to go. But then I thought, you know, for a tablet, which Google's about to make a big push into tablets again. They announced that at Google I.O. And on an iPad, if I could get Linux 5.18, and then eventually they could get a graphical interface working based on the work the Asahi project is doing, who they just got their first triangle rendered on the M1 platform,

I don't know, maybe there's going to be a day where I'm running GNOME on an Apple device. Yeah, but, okay, I support this, obviously, because I like seeing Linux run really wherever it can. Yeah. But what are you doing on that tablet? I mean, I don't know. Browsing the web?

I don't know. 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, 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. It's been quite the week. Each one of us is bringing our own topic.

Brent's been battling the lizards all weekend. We'll find out how his tumbleweed box may have gone sideways. Wes has been cramming NixOS into places that I didn't think he'd be able to go. We'll find out where and why. And then I am reversing course on an executive decision I made about a year and a half ago. I'll tell you why that is. Then we'll round it all out with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before I go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room, everybody. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hello, Chris and Wesess and hello branch hello thank you for making it nice to see everybody there this is an interesting trend we've got a lot of people in quiet listening again these days i love it thank you for making it there too we are uh live on jupiter.2 more about that later in the show, because at first I want to take a moment and just put the word out there that if you are planning to attend the London meetup, there is some things in flux that they need to know about. Right, Brent?

Yeah, I just learned that the date has changed. So instead of August 6th, Alex, I guess, has shifted things slightly. That's why he's planning so far in advance to August 5th. And that's 6 p.m. GMT. Don't be shown up at like Pacific time or anything because that's how meetup.com tends to show it. I did also notice that there are more than 70 people who have RSVP'd. So I think last week we were at 40. That's almost double, which is kind of impressive. The location, therefore, is to be determined. But I think we'll figure that out in the next little bit. Yeah, and this is unfortunate, but it's doable.

I think it was going to be on a Friday. Now it's going to be on a Saturday or something like that. Alex is still figuring it out. He got contacted by his airline. And for his convenience, they're rebooking his flight. For his convenience. Who would have thought that planning a cross-country meetup might have some details to figure out yeah who would cross-continent meetup really indeed that's pretty cool i'm i'm bummed we couldn't make it

even speak the same language over there no they speak english yeah you know i realized too they actually say hdmi right because they're pronouncing the sound the H makes. We say HDMI. I mean, I'm used to saying A all the time, so it's fine. When you say, but how do you say HDMI? Do you say H-D-M-I or do you say H? No, I'm with you, HDMI. But, you know, they invented the thing, so I don't know, GIF, GIF.

R-G-A? I don't know. Anyways, I'm just saying, it's not all bad over there. Now, they just didn't smell so bad. Except for Popey. He smells great. But yeah, so keep an eye at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. That's unfortunate.

But that is the state of the airline industry right now. And we'll just keep it up to date over there. So let's start with my reversal. This will be pretty quick. So I think this is probably a good place to start. I surprised a lot of the hosts last week here at Jupiter Broadcasting when I announced that Jupiter Broadcasting was getting back into PeerTube. PeerTube is a YouTube in a box replacement that is based around web torrent technology to do peer-to-peer streaming of the video to offload the most expensive part about live streaming, which is the bandwidth. And it's something we've talked about before on the show.

We're a big fan of where they're going with it. It participates in the ActivityPub Federation Network. So you can actually, there's this beautiful world where Mastodon and PeerTube can actually communicate and cross pollinate each other. It's it's really cool. We shut it down due to some limitations at the time that didn't just didn't really work for us. Yeah, right. We had an old PeerTube and it was fun to try, but it didn't. It just seemed like it wasn't, you know, the place where we were at and wanted to do and its stage of development.

Yeah, we were kind of at the time we were kind of thinking of it as a full youtube replacement so we would post all of our stuff there right yeah be another like the archive with jb stuff right and maybe we would create a channel for each one of the shows you could subscribe to the coda radio channel and the linux unplugged channel and um don't listen to those guys on linux action news they're crazy don't know what they're talking about new so you could pick and choose. But this time around, I've decided to do just sort of a live version,

a limited archive of our live shows. And we're trying to do video where we can for those to make it, you know, a little more enjoyable. I'll get all of that. The idea really came to me though, when I thought, well, we've gotten a decentralized community with Matrix

and that's been going really well. We've been working on a decentralized value system with Boost. That's building out. It's early days, but it's building out. But we don't really have a decentralized media solution. And that really got me thinking about PeerTube again, because I think it really brings everything we've been talking about in 2022 together. We don't really need another project, but I think we can do something here that completes a picture of decentralized media. So everything from the distribution to the funding to the community interaction, it can all be decentralized. We've never really been at this place before. This is a new era in technology that you can actually host yourself on your own infrastructure.

Still early, but it seems, you know, just based on some of the other results, like it seems like something worth continuing to explore and invest in. And the whole stack is free. It's all free software, right from the OBS machine that we're using to stream right now, all the way up to restream. And if you're watching on a Linux box, too, all the way down to your system. That's why you want Linux on your tablet. There you go. And there's the advantage of things like no takedown bots.

But here's the idea. I thought, well, we'll have live stream recordings up there. It'll be archived for a period of time. We'll stream special events like Apple's WWDC. I'm going to do it like a Mystery Science Theater WWDC stream tomorrow. Yeah, I'll have a link in the show notes if you want to try it. And we can go live earlier over there because we don't have to worry about copyright violations. So you can kind of get the pre pre show over there.

And the number one question I got is why not make this a members only thing you know now that you've added video i like that that somehow the audience is suggesting this yeah yeah well you guys too not you specifically but a lot of the team did but also it was like that when i in matrix i was asking people their opinions and you know trying it out last week and a lot of people said well why not just do a members-only thing? Well, so the members-only feed's not going away. It's an audio feed with the show notes, and we publish it almost immediately after the show. That remains.

The source feed for that audio is better quality. It includes some processing in Jack. And it doesn't include all the dead air on the live stream when we're bringing the streams up. And it's just a standby screen and all that kind of stuff and we don't go back and prune the archive like we're going to do on pure tube to keep storage costs down and we're not going to be posting the live stream video version to anything like youtube or anything like that or right so with the with the member feed you get the convenience right you can just it's like any other podcast etc this is a something a little different yeah and to dip our toe into something, which is bigger that I'll talk about here in a moment,

but another reason it was an audience first reason is work from home. You know, we hear from people that they just don't commute as much now. And I'm honestly humbled that so many of you have figured out new ways to work us into your routines. And we don't take that for granted at all. And we're going to work hard every single week to try to make that decision worth it. But also I just hear from people out there that they're at their desks more when they listen. So this might be something you could, you know, when you're at your desk, you go up to JupyterTube and watch it on there, potentially. Also, it's just a minimal overhead. We're not making these video shows.

These are still audio, multi-track recordings that have an audio editor. We're just adding some cameras. Because of the low-key nature of it, it actually probably looks worse than we did 10 years ago. But I just don't care, right? I'm'm not taking it seriously youtube is a fool's game i don't much respect anybody wants to try it so it does work for some people but i hate what it incentivizes as a platform so we have no interest in that um and the overhead is pretty minimal i've done live switching for a decade so for me me, it's pretty natural to live switch while I'm talking. You just did it now. Whoa.

Whoa. So that's no big deal. But the other bigger reason, kind of looking out, the podcasting 2.0 community is working on live stream support inside the podcast app. Now, this is where this is going. Tell me more about this. So you got your favorite podcast app and you pull up your podcast and when Linux Unplugged is live on a Sunday, we'll just show up as another entry in the list of your podcasts with a little badge or

however the developer implements it that says this is a live show. And then you can tap that and in your existing podcast player, you can just listen to the live stream like with all your podcast controls. That is neat. Yeah. Dang. We've needed that for a long time. Yeah, because otherwise

we have to direct people to like a whole separate setup, right? And there's a lot of URLs to figure out. Yeah. And some apps will let you, some of the like Podverse, some of the podcasting 2.0 apps already support this.

They'll let you opt in for notifications when the show goes live if you want inside the app. You manage it inside the app. You just say, yeah, notify me or by default it doesn't. So that I'm looking forward to. But right now it's primarily audio that's in these apps but there are members in the podcasting 2.0 community who are working on making this also a video and audio option so

you would pick when you tap on if you want to watch the video or the audio and the awesome thing about that is they're doing this based around peererTube as the origination point for the video. So the podcasting 2.0 folks are going to basically kind of encourage PeerTube adoption for people who want to stream their video. And one of the developers working on this is Alex Gates. He's one of the podcasting 2.0 community members working on a bunch of awesome projects, but he's working on this video stuff using PeerTube. this video stuff using PeerTube. And he said, this was this morning in a conversation I had with him, he said, the goal is to get PeerTube live stream support either upstream or via a series of plugins, which live notifications go through pod ping on a federated live chat via XMPP in a curated RSS feed out of the

box. Now, this is a lot of jargon, but what he's saying is they're going to leverage a bunch of open standards like ActivityPub and XMPP to do this backend work. And he's going to create an example spec for people to follow that can then implement it in the app or implement it as a podcaster. And he says, I also want to provide the capability for apps to choose to participate in a web torrent bandwidth sharing or just stream it directly, too. So you could also help with that. That'd be nice. All from the podcasting app. So that's another reason we're doing it.

We're just going to kind of start experimenting with that stuff. And the peer to project is such a great piece of free software as well. So I just wanted to experiment with it again. And I've gotten some community members who have offered to help us do some of the admin side so we can kind of take over some of that. And I'll do my first experiment, which our YouTube, I was just looking, our YouTube channel has been in trouble since November 20th, 2020, when I did a mystery science theater Apple stream. And they gave us one of those, like, if you screw up again, you can't live stream anymore. And it's been on our account

since November of 2020. So I just got to try it now, you know, like next week, I'm just going to give it a go on Monday and see what happens to do all of that. We ended up deploying this instance of Jupyter tube on NixOS. Yeah, we did. And we deployed NixOS on Linode, which is not one of their default images. No, no, we, um, we had a little bit of fun with that. Yeah. We learned a few things along the way. And I don't know what you think would maybe be the most helpful thing to relay to people that want to try this as well. Because I know what we figured out was there's some label stuff with the disks and that kind of thing. Yeah, you know, you kind of you got to learn the particulars of the hosting platform that you're using.

And so I'd play with it on like a couple other hosts that I already had set up when I first started dabbling for the NexOS challenge but we hadn't actually deployed anything like on the JB stuff really except playing around with VMs yeah locally nothing up on Linode so it was fun I liked it because it was just like you and I sort of like pair installing NexOS and I'd never like walked through you know we've installed other like we've done Arch before

and that kind of thing but it was neat it was it was fun because we were tempted to follow a guide, but also wanted to do it on our own. So we kind of did like a mix of both, which did lead us to make one little mistake with, I guess, how the Nix installer finds the drives to set up for boot. Yeah, so one of the particulars that we had to take into account was just sort of the nature of the virtualization and the setup. particulars that we had to take into account was just sort of the nature of the virtualization and the setup. And so instead of having, you know, like a partition table set up on the disk, by default, you get just like the whole disk. And Linode has a fancy setup where they'll run grub. And then that'll find your, you know, find your boot drive and load your kernel and that kind of thing. But NixOS is so neat that you just kind of enable a couple command line options,

right? And you say like, oh, yeah, well, I'm choosing BIOS boot or EFI and enable grub for me please. You don't really have to do much else. And that was the first time that we got into a situation where it's like I know how to fix like regular grub things, but you know or the ArchWikis guy to install grub or whatever, but here we're kind of just seeing this failure and it's saying like, ah, this mode

you have to install in this mode, but you can't actually use, you know, this type of thing. Yeah, not supported and it just airs out when it's trying to do the bootloader stuff. Yeah, exactly. And you could go the other way. You could obviously repartition things. So we thought about taking that path. But we found some resources that suggested that can break some of Linode's, you know, they've got functionality.

And there's reasons, obviously, they've chosen the default setup that they have. And if you want to keep things like have it be able to fix you know, fix your root password for you or something like that, you probably shouldn't vary that. That's where they also suggested, I guess Linode suggests, don't use UUIDs for your disks. Go by label, at least. I don't know if that's still relevant, but at least at one time that was the suggestion. Oh, okay. I thought that was

our secret sauce, because it seemed like when we started going by label, then the bootloader finished installing. Well, so then we also found out how, you know, learn more about how the grub setup works in nixos to go ask it still write all the config files because we wanted those but just don't bother with the part where you go you know write the grub magic onto the physical part of the disk and that was the part that was failing so then like you know there was no once we got that little config change it just worked so that's pretty easy they do have a guide which we could have followed but yeah we did it the the painful way so instead of doing what we

did we'll have some links in the show notes that will sort of lay this out if you want to copy it because i mean once we figured that out even though we kind of we did it a couple times we debated like because to be clear we this was like after the show last weekend and so we're kind of we did it a couple times we debated like because to be clear we this was like after the show last weekend and so we're kind of just like all right how quickly can we get peer to back up and going yeah trying to like hazily like remember the last time because we just played with it right we threw the old one away we didn't think we needed again now we were done then we're gonna use that again but it was nice because we went down and then we decided oh no let's like start again reinstall now we found some like better directions for how we're going to do this and since we just had our same configuration.nix file it was no big deal yeah that was what was so great is to put that another way is when we were trying to go through all this and it didn't work

and we were just about like ah screw it we'll just go you know we'll go deploy 2204 or whatever it'll be fine when we did right at that moment we we're like, actually, yeah, if we just grab that configuration file and we just start over and do it the right way, well, all the work was really filling out the config. It'll just rebuild. And that is such a great moment with Nix.

It's so nice. And to that end, right after we went through all that manual process of installing it, like the next day or something, two days later, the new version of Nix came out

with a graphical installer, ironically. Right. So we tried it out for Linux Action News. And I put it on my ThinkPad that we were doing the BcacheFS testing on a couple of weeks ago. And I left it on there. And I started using it over the weekend. Just kind of filling out that configuration file. And it's the same thing.

As a test over the weekend, I just blew the whole thing away. I dropped the configuration file back on there and rebuilt the whole system. And it's the same thing. I has a test over the weekend. I just blew the whole thing away. I dropped the configuration file back on there and rebuilt the whole system. And it's amazing. And I have everything in that file I need to work. All my applications, my Flatpak support, my tailscale stuff, everything. And I like having it in one file.

I know I could do includes. I don't want to. I don't want to, Wes. I like having it all in one file. I love it that way. And I wasn't really sure when we took the NixOS challenge a bit ago how Nix would be on the desktop. I was solely focused on the server. Oh.

Oh, it's so good on the desktop. It turns out for a certain kind of like, I just want this thing to always work. Like on my ThinkPad, I want to raise the screen and get to work. Maybe it's not your like tinkering, constantly fiddling with your setup or something but on a machine yeah right you're just like i i want a few plugins installed i want to configure a couple of things and then just be playing you can even declare the gnome extensions you want a little playing with fire in case there's a gnome update but i think that's pretty great um and then last but not least and i'm sure this is true with silver blue as well what really seals the deal and bridges the gap

from like a 90% solution to 100% solution for me is Flatpak. So when you have Flatpak on NixOS, I've declared like all of my core system in the configuration file. And that's incredibly powerful. But then like if I want to just rando try something, there's almost always a Flatpak of it now. And I can just throw it on my system with Flatpak.

And that also works. But between Flatpak and the server world of containers, obviously Flatpak uses the same sort of primitives. Yeah, right. We've got these nice escape hatches now that you really can have a really locked down setup sort of base system and then bolt some stuff on as you see fit. setup sort of base system and then put some stuff on as you see fit. So if you haven't heard the news, if you haven't listened to Linux Action News from last week, the latest version

of NixOS with the either the GNOME or the Plasma ISOs has the Climaris, is that how we say it? I don't actually know. It's a really well-known distro-agnostic installer. If you've used Manjaro or Endeavor OS or lots of distros out there, you've actually used this installer before. And we were

both really impressed with the implementation. We weren't sure how that would port to something like Nix. No, you know, just because here's a, sure it's set up to be multi-distro and have plugins and, you know, have some extensibility built in. But even when you're supporting multiple distros, like how many of those distros are set up like NixOS, you know, it's kind of a unique setup. So can you work with that framework to actually marry those two things? Because there's a bunch of different, you know, the process and the setup is different.

You got to hook into the Nix system. But what's so neat about that is like, once you've learned a little bit about Nix enough to go like, read some Nix, Nixlang files, you just go look at like, you can just go look at the MR adding this feature and see exactly all the patches and what had to change and how the modules fit together.

It's so cool. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60 day credit on a new account and you go there to support this show. This show is made possible by you taking advantage of our sponsors offers. And Linode is one that I am totally on board with endorsing because we have built so much of our infrastructure on Linode.

It's one of these sponsors where I have just spent hours and hours and hours using their platform. I can tell in those hours that this is something that has been iterated and approved on for years. this is something that has been iterated and approved on for years. You know, Linode started nearly 19 years ago, before AWS was a twinkle in Bezos' eye. And their mission has remained unchanged since all of that.

Even with all of these other crazy competitors coming on board, jacked up with their VC funds, Linode has focused on making cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible to all. This has led to the best-in-class experience, with performance, with configuration options, and with support. Literally, Linode can provide a level of support that the hyperscalers are just not designed for. And you can really see what I'm talking about when you go to linode.com slash unplugged, and you get that $100. And you know, they've got one click systems. Say you want to deploy something just super quick and get up and going like a next cloud or a Jitsi or lots.

I mean, there's, those are the ones I always mentioned because those are the ones I have deployed, but there's so many and what they call their marketplace. But it's also really great for those of you who are cooking with gas, you know, maybe you use Terraform or Kubernetes and to that end, Linode has a free ebook they've put out, Decorative Cloud Infrastructure Management with Terraform. It's a book that covers infrastructure as code, covers a lot about Terraform specifically. And they talk about the unique aspects of Linode's Kubernetes engine and Terraform that let you import your existing infrastructure into Terraform and do things that are really next level. I've only really begun to understand the power of this, but now I really understand why some of you out there like this kind of stuff. Linode's all about it. Plus they got 11 data centers around the world. They are their own ISP, S3 compatible object storage, which is just killer. DDoS protection, VLAN support, a powerful DNS manager with pricing

30 to 50% cheaper than those major cloud hyperscalers. It's pretty great and the best customer support in the business. And it's a great way to support the show. Go build something, go learn something, go try something. Go sign up today at linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 in 60 day credit on your new, and you support this here show. Linode.com. Unplugged. Brent, you kind of surprised, I think, both Chris and myself this week when you let on that you've still been running Tumbleweed on your laptop. I kind of totally, unfortunately, I'll admit it here.

It's my bad, but I kind of just forgot. You know, we engaged in the tumbleweed world. I got very distracted by NixOS, but you, you kept on the path. He stuck with it. And sounds like it kind of went sideways, maybe, at least most recently. I remember, I think it was, well, it's actually Linux Unplugged 4.3.2 when we did the tumbleweed kind of, the three of us tried a bunch of different ways of playing with it. did the tumbleweed kind of the three of us tried a bunch of different ways of playing with it and i remember distinctly making a promise in there which was that i would continue using it and we

would do an update at some point now i did not plan for that to be this week but it seemed like a natural natural thing to do considering i ran into a few little issues that I thought I would discuss. Uh-oh. Yeah, it's like tumbleweed tribulations. The weeds of tumbleweed. Okay, let me give you a little context I guess is fair. I have a laptop that I use, you know, every single day. It's not running tumbleweed. It's running something else. But I do have a podcasting laptop that its sole purpose is just to make sure my voice sounds great and records everything and connects with you guys, you know, once, twice, three times a week.

And it's kind of the podcasting appliance. And that one is running Tumbleweed. Ah, so you're putting the most risk over there. Yeah, OK. I know. Well, if you remember correctly, during that episode way back, I think it was November. I actually did our episode, recorded it on that laptop, even though it was the first time that we were kind of getting familiar with it. So it was a little risky and

you know, I like risk. So I stayed with it and it's been great. Now that being said, it's been an appliance, so I haven't really treated it maybe the way i should treat a rolling release christ i know in the past you've got caught with this with with arch but i never updated it since november oh uh-oh uh-oh branch it's going to be quite a few months since november now that's not how rolling distros are supposed to work brandt and i And I know better as well, but it ended up being kind of fun. Is this going to be a new thing? And you were traveling too. I mean, there's all kinds of excuses you probably could come up with, I imagine. Yeah, I've got many of them that I'm telling myself. It started as a really simple thing because this thing just runs and I never

have any issues with it. But I tried to use it for a different purpose, which was I tried to use cheese, if you guys are familiar with cheese, just to do a little video with some audio of me playing the drums over here that are on my right and ran into like a small issue. And I was like, oh, well, I'll just, you know, I'll just update and reboot and everything will be fine. Right. I was like, oh, yeah, I haven't updated this ever. And it turned out to be slightly problematic. So it wanted to do updates of like 2,300 packages, which I guess makes sense. Like two gigs worth of stuff. Wow. Like a Brent's offended by this. Don't give me all these. Why so many packages? Jeez, how dare you bring me to the current state? It was an interesting experiment because I've, you know, run Entergos before.

Thanks to the, you know, the Arch Challenge, Chris, that you enabled way back. And I just got sort of cozy again with the rolling lifestyle. You know, every once in a while something breaks and you have to dig in and you can't really schedule this. You just kind of have to be okay with it and solve some issue and stay up later than you want to and learn a bunch along the way. And I think this time really what I learned was the power of Zipper and how nice its interface is. At first, when I was solving this and I was trying to play drums, I just wanted to quickly record something. I just used Discover to try to do the updates and it was, hmm, let's say problematic. So it threw like 20 errors, which I thought, well, that's not great. And some

dependency resolution errors, which I don't think Discover is built to solve. And then it started asking me for pseudo privileges for every single package thereafter that actually worked. And there's 2000 packages, right? I remember this in our chat. You're like, nope, this is where I'm out. I'm out. Shouldn't have chosen a really, really long secure password there, Brent. So using Discover is not typically my way of doing upgrades, but I just forgot to remember Zipper. It had been, you know, since November that we talked about it. So I dug into our show notes and I remembered all of these things and it turned out Zipper was far more helpful, as you might imagine.

It gave some really helpful tips, like it suggested, oh, wait, you got all these updates, but actually you want to run a different command. So it said, consider canceling right at the bottom and said, consider canceling. You have to sort of use a different command to update the entire OS. I was like, Oh, that's so helpful. It was really great. So it was like, no, no run, run, run zipper, you know, distro upgrade. And I was like, Oh, that is nice. So I decided to do that. And those 21 problems showed up with some helpful solutions and stuff. So I was able to get through those. They ended up being some like vendor change problems, which I think is sort of normal. I'm not sure. I'm not that familiar with it.

I did install the like codecs, multimedia codecs. So I think it might have something to do with that. I did some research. Some people were talking about it was really helpful. Like my research was very short because I was able to search for exactly the error errors and they came up right away. So it was really nice to see that the community was on top of this stuff pretty quickly. I did find Neil in there somewhere sharing comments as well about how things were working and not working. So it was nice to see some familiar faces. So thanks, Neil. So I got through all those errors

pretty smoothly, which I thought was wonderful. And the process that Zipper offered to solve those was equally nice. So I stayed in a fairly good mood for that. So I was finally able to get through the upgrades. There was some stuff that stood out to me that I thought you guys might find was interesting. There were 20 vendor changes, like I mentioned. Two packages wanted to be downgraded, which I didn't expect. And two packages

also wanted to change architecture, which I don't think is a good thing. Yeah, unless they're going from 32 to 64, possibly. It looks like in this case it's going from being explicitly labeled x86-64 to no Arch. So is it maybe just that those packages no longer have a strict requirement on that? Or there's just no 32 option anymore.

Yeah. So that's where my mind went was either that's totally fine and I can just safely ignore it, or it's going to be very bad. And I thought, this is great show content, so I'm just going to go for it. Fair enough. I like the way you think. Right? You've trained me well, sir. It went fine. I ended up with one last error that I haven't solved yet. And it's nice because they offer, you know, Zipr offers solutions. So I have some issue that I've described that I won't get into here.

You know, it has like solution one, deinstall that package. Solution two, keep the obsolete package. Solution three, break it and ignore its dependencies. So it's at least nice that it's trying to solve their own. I don't know which one of those is supposed to be good. I'm just going to ignore the whole thing. But it was super great. Zipper with its like extra verbose information was just fabulous. So, and it, it color codes like the warnings that are like pretty critical seeming are

red and the ones that are like, well, these are just maybe warning. They're yellow. And it was just super nice. So if, if someone wants to try that, I think, um, it was a pretty good time, but it brought me to remembering the whole rolling release lifestyle do you remember what that's like i feel like you're having you're describing a worse version yeah yeah my i mean because the rolling lifestyle you update you update your updates time you know you have to have a little care about it yeah yeah you're kind of like too much the maniac but at the right time for sure and um

but i do remember when i was you know more regularly using sort of a arch base as my everyday you know you get into you know an arch i don't know how this happens but then you end up wanting to like update five six twenty times a day feels good to type syu there's something about i've seen alex every time he sits at his computer, he does that. It's crazy. It felt like these were the exact kind of problems I used to run into on a not daily basis, but you just randomly sort of run into them. So I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or whatever, but it also has taught me a heck of a lot. A lot of the skills that I've learned was trying to troubleshoot some of this stuff. So I think I've, at least with these experiences that

I've got under my belt, I've come to the conclusion that the rolling release lifestyle is great because you get the updated software, you get to play with new stuff like, you know, Pipewire comes out pretty darn fast and all the new stuff you can play with. From that perspective, it's awesome. The community tends to be also quite great. You know, if you run into an issue typically within an hour or less, someone's already talking about it. That I found really great. Is there a but coming here? Well, it just gets me pondering because you also have lots of unplanned learning and maintenance. And I think maybe I'm at a point now where I don't really appreciate that. And I

wondered how you guys feel about that. That's interesting because that was going to be my observation is you kind of have to be, and it seems like you successfully did it though, but you kind of have to be willing to convert a real pain in your butt into a learning opportunity. And you kind of have to keep your head about it and work your way through it. Because I know my initial reaction these days is when there's a whole bunch of package issues, I'm like, screw this, I'm out. And I'll just wipe it. But with Seuss, in particular, when we were trying Tumbleweed, I stuck with it when I had an issue so that way I could try to learn it. And I do think it was beneficial.

But it's a mindset thing. Well, no, it's true, right? There's that sort of tradeoff. Certainly you could switch back to, you know, LTS, Brent's LTS lifestyle, but then you, what kind of cadence do you want for upgrades? And you kind of have to figure out, do you want lots of small changes or

less frequent big changes? This could be a story of sort of like, oh gosh, the new Ubuntu is really different now and I'm getting some pipe wire or whatever and then your whole system isn't working for the weekend as you re-figure that out. Yeah, and there is Leap. There there is leap. There is leap. That is true. That is true. Maybe that's worth considering. Well, I think it's worth me sticking with this because then we can, you know, see where it goes in another six months. That's the real question. Yeah. I mean,

you're connected today, so it must be working right now. Yeah, I think it's working. It's working, right? As far as I can tell. Yeah. yeah you know at the back of my mind the whole time i was remembering that butter fs is just baked in by default and that i could just roll back if i totally went down the wrong path and try something else so i think you're gonna have to try that for the show yeah maybe i should try harder to screw it up but that insurance was really nice too so so you're saying that's one of the things that can mitigate right right, the unplanned nature. If you're sort of like, oh, I wanted to do an upgrade, but I'm also about to go traveling. I don't have time to fix this because I needed to go download my podcast for the flight or whatever.

Right. And you can just be like, nope, old one. I'll deal with this later. Very good point. I did notice in OpenSUSE's news section, they had a community annual survey that came out, I guess, a few months ago now. community annual survey that came out, I guess, a few months ago now. And they did mention that most people who took the survey recommend OpenSUSE distributions for advanced users, and it's the least recommended for new users. So at least, you know, users are thoughtful in how they're recommending these things. That's interesting.

That's interesting because don't you think YAST is sort of trying to appeal to a new user? That's interesting because don't you think YAST is sort of trying to appeal to a new user? I mean, I do think I kind of agree, but when I think of SUSE, I think of a distribution that's trying to cater to people that have never had to configure a Linux machine, too. Yeah, it's true, but I wonder if that's not necessarily new user and it's like differently competent computer user. I feel like you'd need to also understand how to configure, say, Windows for that to be super useful out of the gate. I feel like you'd need to also understand how to configure, say, Windows for that to be super useful out of the gate. And probably the same people who aren't into configuring computers at all. It's not like Yast is suddenly going to be... I mean, it is better than figuring out the command line, perhaps, right?

But it's still a complicated system if you don't understand the basic of how your system works. Yeah, that's probably where I was when I first started trying it. And I was used to managing a Windows system. Yeah, one of the quotes from the survey results, I thought, packed it up pretty nicely. It said the distribution was easy to use and were held in high regard, especially for the core uses of the server with web hosting, databases, containers, and virtualization. So I think if you're in the world already, go try it. You're going to be fine. But if you don't really know what Linux is and you're just getting into it, this is not the place for you. So you're going to stick with it, though?

Yeah, I don't know. This seems exciting. Otherwise, it's been totally fine and very fun to use. So yeah, unless someone has a better idea for me to go down some rabbit hole, I'm willing to hear about it. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I like it. You know, we kind of had to give up the whole Arch updates on the air, but now we can rent us this tumbleweed. We kind of had to give up the whole Arch updates on the air, but now we can rent us this tumbleweed. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started for free at Bitwarden.com slash Linux for an individual user or start a trial for your team or enterprise.

Bitwarden is the easiest way for businesses and individuals to store, share, and sync sensitive data. It's fully customizable. You can turn off features in your enterprise with policies you don't want. It's built on open source, so you know I love it and trust it. And it has a huge community around it,

including a big self-hosting community. It's what Wes and I use to manage all of our passwords, our two-factor code tokens, and other sensitive data like recovery keys. Some apps these days require things beyond just a password to recover or get back into them. And one of the things that I really like is how they keep iterating the experience and making it better and better. You guys know I'm all about that. It's like, do something, do it really well,

and then just focus on that and make it better. And that's why when they added username generators, I was like, heck yes. But now, now it's even better. Now when you use Bitwarden to generate your username and a password, it'll also tie in with simple login or a non-addy or something like Firefox Relay. You enter your API key for one of those services and now it'll generate an email address. So you're getting a username, password and email address that is unique just to that account, just to that service, just there. Right. So if something happens, if the worst thing happens and their passwords get leaked, you're good. They didn't even get your email address. This is brilliant. And this is what I'm talking about. As a Bitwarden user,

I've noticed it just keeps getting better and better. I've been a user for a couple of years and it's just great. On Android, they've just now added quick account switching. When you're at the password fill out screen, you just tap your user icon, switch over to your other account, maybe like, you know, for your business stuff. They're adding features all the time, too, that are great for businesses and individuals who like to just self-sovereign it. You know, like I appreciate that, that they can walk that line and they do it so well and they contribute back upstream to make it possible. It's easy to get started with Bitwarden, too. That's the best thing. You might even import your existing password database. It did mine. So go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Try it out for yourself, for your business, or more than likely, maybe you have a

friend or a family member or a colleague that needs to just do a little bit better with their passwords. I legit can't tell you how many people I've seen just store their passwords on a sticky note under the keyboard. If that's you, or you know somebody that's doing that, stop. Right now, and go to bitwarden.com slash linux. Support the show, and try it out for free. bitwarden.com slash linux. As usual, we got some great boosts this week.

They just seem to be getting better and better all the time. And now, it is time for Le Boost. fountain nice so breeze is a lightning storefront in your phone basically it's a it's a lightning wallet that runs a lightning node so you are all 100 self-contained and uh it can connect to our podcast feed and you can send a boost in without having to switch podcast convenient double boost silver koala also wrote in again four days ago with 5 000 sets i've noticed've noticed that Bree's app also has limited notes like Fountain. Yeah, I like this. I like you can send a little note in there. I think it's like 300 characters or something like that. Just fine by me.

See, I interpreted that to mean limited notes, i.e. not our full show notes show up. Remember? Oh, you're right. This sounds like an issue tracker kind of boost to me. Okay. All right. We can add that.

I think I wouldn't count on Breeze having all the notes, though. But Fountain, we got to get on that. It's all part of figuring things out in a relationship. Yeah, well, speaking of, 4.12 Linux boosted in five days ago with 500 sats with some feedback on the whole members feed stuff and video and live. We asked for that, so let's have it. Well, 4.12 Linux has been listening to the live feed since its availability. Hey, that, so let's have it. Well, 412 Linux has been listening to the live

feed since its availability. Hey, that's awesome. Really enjoys it. Multitask while listening, so video is not that important, but it is nice occasionally to, you know, pop in and watch the video or for special occasion, just something you mentioned there, Chris. Part two, I do like when you include small bits about the sponsors in the live feed. I like that I don't have to listen to the whole ad, but I get to know the sponsor in special deals or info. Thanks for the show. You know what? We have the best members ever. I mean, so 412, thank you for being a member and then for boosting on top of that. You are, you are great. So thank you very much for that. User 6092, six days ago, boosted in with 5,000 sats. Ah, yes. This one was about the intel software defined cpu that

we covered and a lot of people had thoughts on that and user 609 wrote is intel underestimating the risk of geeks managing to crack their processors i'm not condoning or promoting this but surely buying a processor for 100 bucks and ending up with an equivalent $400 model is very tempting. And I can see disgruntled Linux users giving some direct feedback on what they think of this business model. Do you guys think it's possible people could figure out ways to hack this? You know, I'm sure Intel has tried not to make that happen, and you've got to get past some of the crypto stuff. But probably the most realistic way is is like all these things, right? There's a mistake somewhere

and you can take advantage of it. That said, I imagine that's somewhat less of concern if like perhaps the enterprise sort of or data center market or similar things is more where they're thinking for this. I don't know that us, you know, retail consumers are really going to be the people paying to enable the features.

Maybe it'll go that way. I hope not. We were speculating in the pre-show that this could be years away. Like if Intel is trying to get it upstream into 5.18 now, it might be years before we see a product that uses this because perhaps they want to get it into something like RHEL. So that way, when they do ship an enterprise product that uses the software-defined features, distributions like RHEL and Debian already have the feature set. And if that's the case, we're looking at years of not knowing. But one of the things I'm trying to figure out,

and we talked about how this mechanism works, I'm trying to figure out how the mechanism is going to verify that your authorization files, your licenses to do this, to activate these features, how does it figure out it's valid? There's two mechanisms. There's a feature that gets enabled, and there's a file that's the license to enable that feature. And what prevents me from taking that license file off of my file system and giving it to Wes and him putting on his file system and having that feature? Maybe there is something I'm missing. Maybe it's more complicated than that. Or maybe there's some sort of cloud activation aspect to this as well that we haven't heard about yet that wouldn't be revealed in their code to the kernel. right we just kind of know about the interface not necessarily the

what user space thing's going to be talking to the kernel and loading these various things and into the capabilities boost marcel wrote in six days ago with uh one nine six nine sats chris have you figured out if there's anything, any special meaning to that number? It feels like a birthday. Or just a really great year? Yeah. Feels like a year to me. 1969.

That's how I read it. Good music that year, I think, if I remember. Yeah, maybe, maybe. They're right. I'm very anti-SDSI. But let's remember, Intel is responsible here, not Linux. Why should the kernel get flack for implementing this feature? You're right. Linux is about freedom. Yeah. Good point there yeah the

currently i think the criminal community has kind of learned that people are going to do it anyway so maybe this helps now marcel's right i last last week i was just saying should we like as a community try to like act as a last line of defense for this and it would start with the community but marcel's right it's it's like okay if you do it for intel then you got to do it for so many other hardware devices where do we draw the line you know it does occur to me 1969 was uh right before the start of the old uh unix epoch that could be it let us know marcel that could be it mage also wrote in via the feedback at linuxunplugged.com slash contact on the same topic they They write CPU as a service. Say hello to the next generation for ransomware.

That's a nice compute slash virtualization cluster slash database. CRP you've got there would be a shame if virtualization and extra CPU cores were disabled until you paid us. That would be a shame. That's the enterprise use case I'm thinking of. It's funny to kind of pitch it as ransomware. Like you have something on your computer, but you can't unlock it until you pay us there is like there is a little bit of that all right i'll take this next one because this was a special triple boost by the golden dragon i didn't know that was even possible

totally in 2000 sats uh golden dragon was uh boosting along as they listened in the pre-show they speculated that this systemd stuff may play out fairly interesting to observe and wondered if it would work well on a system like arch and the systemd feature they're talking about is building in the ab system updating mechanism into system D. And, you know, you hear what Brent just went through, maybe. Because right now, SUSE is accomplishing that with file system technology and, you know, things like Snapper sitting on top of that. But wouldn't it be interesting if system D could manage some of that A-B system switching for them?

I could see that being nice in the sort of unification factors. If you, you know, more distros have that functionality and it worked similarly across them, that could neat uh come keeping up with the uh triple boost in b-o-o-s-t on sdsi i'm mostly an opponent of drm so this seems like an anti-consumer move locking parts of the experience behind a paywall just reads the same as when the gaming industry went to full downloadable content and day one patches yeah i remember that world uh who knows what the lengths intel is willing to go to on this want to overclock pay us virtualization pay us virtualization would be really you know like these low-end consumer devices that just

can't do that and it would just suck too from the linux perspective of you know like we're so used to assuming that like you get this os and you get all these things, you know, maybe it's not the most performant version or whatever, but like you can do it. More limitations would be lame. A lot of people wrote in, this was a comment thread on Matrix too, about the resale market. How is this going to mess with the resale market, especially if Westpain buys the features, it's licensed to Westpain's Intel account. Yeah, it's licensed to me or the chip. Yeah. And does it make the to me or the chip. Yeah. And does it make the resale market

just totally screwed? Like you got an $800 value computer, but when you sell it and the features get deactivated, now it's only a $600 computer because the CPU doesn't do as nearly. But that's why it makes sense to have an ongoing subscription cost.

That way, you know, that's why when you're done with it, you don't have to keep paying for it. Just make it part of your Intel Plus subscription. Oh, man. I hope subscription. Oh, man. I hope not. Oh, geez. I think the resale market was the aspect I didn't think of the most during the show that we got the most feedback on, too.

Here's the last boost that came in from the Golden Dragon, although they said quad. I saw three boosts, but they invoked the Cone of Silence for this one. So this is private. The Cone of Silence for this one. So this is private. The Cone of Silence. That's just for us. Come on in here. They're right. I might have a slight boost addiction.

So let's just try to move right past this. The Cone of Silence. He writes, I just wanted to say I really enjoyed the show and I'm glad to be able to help out this way. I streamed some sats and I got my two cents in all in a cool new way. F yeah, boost to grams and F yeah, go JB. That's great. We got a thank you boost from user 8892. Did a mic test for 2100 sats.

Test, test, test. And this is, I think we'll do one more week now of our splits. So when you boost in a split, I think we're doing 10, 15%. I can't remember. I think it's maybe 15. We're giving 15% of the splits to OpenSats, which is a charity that donates 100% of the funds they receive to free software projects. So your boosts are going to help open source as well. If you'd like to send a boost, go grab a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com or keep your podcast app and you can just use Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z.technology. Something special for our picks this week. We don't ever do this ever. I don't think we've

never picked a subscription. We've never picked anything really that's not software for the most part, except for with a very few exceptions. But this week is an exception week. Our buddy Michael Larable over at Pharonix has launched a special edition of the subscription price for the 18th birthday of Pharonix. Yep. Happy birthday to Pharonix. Freaking A, man. That is very impressive june 5th 2022 marks the 18th birthday for pharonix.com for pharonix it's kind of hard to say fast but i got it to mark the

occasion there's a premium special if you'd like to go all ad free and i'm going to say this you know the reality is guys um even if you're not a big Foronix reader on the daily, Wes and I are super tuned into all the news in the Linux world for Linux Action News. And a lot of our stories for Linux Action News start with a Foronix article that then sends us down a rabbit hole for coverage in the show. down a rabbit hole for coverage in the show and there is only a very very small handful of original content creators in this space that are not just taking something somebody else is reporting and repeating it doing the hard work of following you know the day-to-day ins outs of the work going on in these projects and then knowing enough understanding of having paid attention for years to give the context to know like what things the rest of the community should know about.

Yeah, that's just it. And every year he gets better at doing what he's doing. And, you know, he's testing the hardware when new hardware comes out and doing the benchmarks as well. Finding kernel regressions. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think he probably is most known for the benchmarks, but a lot of what Michael

does is dig through kernel development stuff. And yeah, there was a regression, a performance regression that we talked about Linux Action News in 5.18. And, you know, sure enough, you start digging into it and Michael's one of the first people talking about it in public. And the kernel developers knew behind the scenes, they weren't saying anything, they were submitting the patches. But Michael, you know, brings light to this kind of stuff. And he does a lot of the original reporting in the linux community a lot of other people are based on the reporting off of what he does so i just wanted to give him a plug he didn't ask us to in fact a year or so ago when i invited him on the show i invited him to plug his membership and he declined he's very humble about he doesn't ask very often so you know 25 bucks for a year or 140 for a lifetime it's a steal yeah it's it's

pharonix's birthday it's pretty great to see it reminds me i need to uh get my subscription i need to renew mine yeah oh geez you know i think i might have a bonus pick here it's actually a software piece too oh brent's sneaking in well audience member jj wrote in with a really great tool uh that they wrote in Rust. I'm sorry, what'd you say? Oh, I said, I think the tool was written in Rust. Huh. Rust, you say? And they got inspired by episode 448 of Linux Unplugged.

Do you remember when we did that encrypted show notes episode where we didn't have any idea what we were talking about to each other? That was our first of each one of us brings a topic, which is what inspired this episode. That's right. And Chris, you touched on some steganography that you hid a bunch of hidden messages in a cute little Levi photo. Well, JJ wrote a little Rust program called Steganosaurus that does a lot of cool things in the steganography world. So check it out. Well done, JJ.

That's great. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. I love it. What a great project, too. He writes in there and helped him ignore some exams, which he did get through. He did finish the exams, which that also is important. Just remember that we get together every single Sunday to do the show live. We start at usually around noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern,

usually a little bit earlier over at JupyterTube, Jupyter.Tube. And don't miss Linux Action News. No, do not. Companion piece. Stuff going on every week in the world of Linux and open source. You know where it goes? Linuxactionnews.com? Yeah, Linux Action News.

I think, you know, there's an RSS feed you can use too. Huh. Yeah, one of those newfangled technologies. Sorry. Sorry about the XML. There's a Jason one too. You know, you could build some stuff on top of that RSS.

You know, if you think about it, you could build some stuff. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, links to what we talked about today are over at our website,

linuxunplugged.com slash 461, right? That's right. How that happened, I don't know. Does that mean we're now closer to 500? That can't be, because we just did the beer thing. So that can't be right. We're going to have to brew a cider this time? That's not bad, Wes. We should just be doing that anyways.

I'm surprised we're not brewing a cider right now. That's how we get Brent to come back to the studio. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us this week. Yeah. I'm only going to take some if it's a hoppy cider. All right. All right. We can make one of those.

Be sure to join us next week at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe for the feed. Thanks so much and see you then. Thank you. so we got some propane for the grillskies what so and i got some costco beef dogs that's you're inspired sir you're gonna-hmm. Mm-hmm. You going to take care of yourself after this, Brent? I always do. You got some work to do over there. More zipper updates to fix. I feel like things are slowly falling apart, but yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll fix them all.

I think it'll be okay. That's better, right? That's better than things quickly falling apart. Yeah, you're right. You can at least see it happening and you can do something about it. Pretend that you can do something about it, at least. You have some hope that you might someday finish all of them. Right.

Yeah. I feel like you just had a, you just made like a really deep metaphor for life when you were talking about his laptop updates. That's, that's deep West. That's why we run Linux, right? Yeah.

That's the West way.