LINUX Unplugged - 467: All Hands on Deck

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

We try and bust a common Linux distro myth. Then what surprised Chris about his new Steam Deck.

Well, now that we're streaming video versions over on Jupiter.tube, we clearly got up our fashion game. And Microsoft, well, they're stepping up with $150 tech pants. You have to see this link in the show notes. It's the hardware designed just for the Xbox Gear shop. And they're really leaning hard into the Windows XP retro look with big, comfy sweatpants and sweatshirts and even $150 pants. Westpain, I think these are screaming your name. Well, I mean, they are. Let me just quote here.

Cargo pants are my go-to item as a creative, said creative director Gavin Matthew. And who can argue with that, right? Like as a creative myself, here making the show, I got to have a spot for all my gadgets, and I really like to pay a premium to Microsoft while I'm at it. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your fashionable weekly talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

My name is Prem. Hello, gentlemen. We have a great show today. We're comfortable in our pants, and we're going to bust a myth. Conventional wisdom tells us KDE Neon just doesn't make for a great, stable workstation. You shouldn't use it as your daily driver, they say. Well, this week, we're going to see if we can debunk that myth. We're going to put it to the test. Maybe we do debunk it, but maybe we don't.

So you'll have to stay tuned for that. Plus, I got my hands on the Steam Deck. It's here, and I've dug into it. Does it make the ultimate portable Linux PC? Will I be broadcasting from the road using my steam deck? I'll share my thoughts on that. And of course we'll round out the show with some great boosts, our picks and a lot more.

So before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, mumble room. Hello, friends. Wow. Listen to that amazing crew we've got today we like to mention that we have the mumble room open with details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble if you'd ever

like to join we got a quiet listening room if you just would like a high quality opus low latency stream and we have the on air we just do a quick mic check with you and then if everything passes you can get on there and uh tag me in the chat room and get your voice in the show plus it's a great time to hang out before and after the show too we're usually yucking it up with our mumble room hey i want to say good morning to tailscale tailscale is a mesh vpn protected by wireguards noise protocol this is what i always wanted to see happen with wireguard we love it we use it it's going to change your game go say good morning and try out tailscale for 20 devices for free go to tailscale.com and if they ask tell them we sent you get it for free for 20 devices it'll change your game tailscale.com now i want to just get a couple items out of the way on the show skis

before we get into all the content because there's some big things that are coming up in the show. I guess you could technically call this some housekeeping, but we wanted to get in front of you that the London meetup is just around the corner. August 5th at 6 p.m. GMT local time. We're so excited about it that Brent broke into Alex's house just to kind of, I don't know, ride on the coattails of the meetup. What? It's true. All his devices were going to be so lonely, so I thought I would have to keep them company, you know. And someone's got to keep Archie well fed.

Come on. I think he's just there to drink all the fancy imported gin. Yeah. And there may still be some donuts and whatnot from our last meetup. So you got to finish those off too. And then also coming up just around the corner, July 28th and the 31st, is Scale 19X at the Hilton Las Vegas Airport in Los Angeles, California. And you can get 50% off the already super cheap tickets by using the promo code LASS50.

One word, when you get your tickets and you get 50% off. Hilton Los Angeles. So it's real simple because it's at the airport. It's July 28th through the 31st at scale. I will not be going this year because I have a family trip at that time, but I will be in California just a little bit after that. So if you're in the area and you would like to say hi, you're going to have an opportunity because our West Coast tour dates have been announced. Of course, Linode is making it possible for us to go out and see the West Coast. It's just time to do it, guys.

We've been to Denver. We've been to Raleigh. We're going to be in London. Now it's time to go to the West Coast. So here are the dates. The meetup pages are rough. They're minimum viable meetup pages. But we have a meetup scheduled in Southern Oregon around the Grants Pass area. Again,

we don't have exact locations yet. That'll be September 20th. Sacramento in California on September 23rd at 6 p.m. And then Southern California, probably in the Pasadena area near JPL after the JPL meetup, but that'll be a separate thing. So there'll be an open to everybody meetup in the Pasadena area in Southern California, September 30th at 6 p.m. Then on our way north, we're going to stop by Portland, and that'll be on Friday, October 7th. We'll be on friday october 7th we'll be in portland so grants pass areas southern oregon september 20th sacramento september 23rd pasadena september 30th portland october 7th what's not on here is spokane or boise we're going to attempt to make a trip out to that area at a separate time when i'm getting some work done on the rig at at least to the Spokane area. So I'll have another meetup I'll announce for that. Also not announced in this batch is the actual JPL tour. We're going to do a lottery for that.

We'll have a way for you to fill out something that we can then run through and pull out names for. And we'll probably pick a batch of people so we can have a few backups. And I'll have that hopefully ready for you next week. How about that? Did I get everything out, guys? Does that all seem clear? Sounds like it's a real good time to just sign up for our general meetup page so you don't miss any of this mayhem. You got it.

And we also have that Matrix room. And we'll put a link to that in there, too. But we have a West Coast crew where we're organizing the details on all of this. We'll have a link, hopefully, in the show notes for that. And you can get in there and interact with us directly. And then as these dates get closer, we'll become more and more active in that room. We'll start coordinating more in there and getting specific. As for the crew, guys, we're going to have an Airbnb down in Pasadena that'll fit about

six of us. So that's where we're going to stay when we get near JPLs. We'll have another crew. Airbnb, it's got a hot tub. It's got an outdoor seating area. Can we have breakfast? Got an outdoor cooking area too, Brent. And the first thing I said is we're going to be doing brunch. Live brunches for everyone.

Can we manage mics around the hot tub without any incidents? Yeah, shotgun mics. There you go. Right? You mount them a safe distance, shotgun in. We got a couple of those. We could totally make it work. So details will be up at meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting for the London meetup and the West Coast tour,

and then later date for the Spokane area meetup, which will be announced in a separate batch. That's a lot. So let's get into some actual Linux stuff. We were going to come on the show today and talk about a really cool project that essentially turns a Raspberry Pi into a remote video broadcast streamer. And you could use this for all kinds of things. Presentations, meetings, podcasting, a way to do video calls,

semi-permanent video links between two locations. I mean, the list goes on and on. The idea is a custom Raspberry Pi image and some plumbing under the hood using GStreamer and Python that automatically spins up GPU accelerated video streams. And this was going to be Brent's remote connection this week. And it just didn't quite work out. We spent some time last night troubleshooting and decided to scratch it and so instead brent had to spend the night and the early morning setting up a completely different system and we decided to take this opportunity

to get brent's renewed experiences with kde neon because i've been running it here on my system for years. So I have a very long-term look at KDE Neon and Brent has a very early kind of first impressions of KDE Neon. And I think these are going to be two very interesting viewpoints to look at this distro as a daily driver. If you're not familiar with kde neon its real primary feature is that it's super current kde plasma desktop the dev team is on neon they're releasing on neon the day that a plasma desktop update comes out when they announce it it's out in the neon repos it's based on a stable version of Ubuntu that they upgrade over time as major LTSs come out. So you get a stable Ubuntu base, an LTS Ubuntu base,

with a rolling Plasma desktop. That's kind of like the special value pitch for Neon. And you can probably understand why I like it for a studio machine. So when Brett needed to build a system quick at Alex's house last night, and it was a desktop tower, we said, well, let's talk about Neon on the show because they're about to release a brand new, super fresh and polished version of KDE. And the best way to get your hands on that kind of stuff is to use Neon. Yeah. I'm also a huge KDE Plasma fan. I have been for quite a while now. And I did try Neon, I think it's about three years ago now when I was considering what to throw in my laptop. It kind of back then just didn't quite work for me. I was in a hurry, of course. And so I gave it a quick look. Some of the updating was different. You know, they suggest you use not apt. There's some other command that Chris, you might be more familiar with. And that just like... right. I would imagine there are some advantages to it that I'm, I'm not very experienced with. Um, but that just like was enough to just turn me off

in that hurried state back then. I'm not a huge fan of it either. Uh, it rides on top of package kit. They prefer you use it. I think the general feeling there is that apt is starting to have some shortcomings. Uh, but what would you relay that to me, I'm like, I totally know what you mean, man. Here's what I do, right? Because, of course, I found a workaround, right? Here's what I do is I do apt update because you can still do that just to update your package list. And then when you do apt upgrade, it yells at you, tells you not to do it, and it actually cancels the command on you. Yeah, that's a bad first user experience from someone who's used to Ubuntu right nobody wants that to be clear to be clear

not meant for first user or anyone who's not ready for a system like this I'll take that back I don't think I'm a new user but I'm a new user to KDE Neon and so there was a nice message there but it I played with it for like 15 minutes trying to get it going and I just couldn't and I was like nah I'm gonna look at something else now I'm not saying do what chris does you're giving brent advice to like get him into trouble before he's even got a chance to install it the real way or deal with like any of reading the dogs or job one always log in his route that's what i do it's fine just fine you don't need to be on a private IP either. Just go and get yourself a public IP.

It's fine. In fact, if you can sort of rejigger your system so X is running as root as well and get rid of Wayland if at all possible. And I think best case scenario for performance, always run your Docker daemon as root. Make sure it's always good to go. No, actually, what I really think you should try, because it's been fine for me, even though don't do this, but this is what I would do. You do an apt update, but then do apt dist upgrade. And if you're doing a dist upgrade, then it doesn't yell at you about using PKCon. And it does everything you need anyways.

I mean, it does mean you'll upgrade your distro on accident, maybe. But that's fine. You know, I bet you the wonderful folks at kd neon are now thinking oh geez we got to fix that so that comes up with the message now yeah i know right they're gonna write a note be like no guys you really don't want to do that i was gonna say or dang it they're talking about us again yeah that too but when i told you that that gave you the peace of mind to proceed and try it i'm assuming it went flawless after that. As all things do, right? Yeah, just to give a little background for those who don't know that I'm actually at Alex's place. Alex is not here. That presents a few interesting challenges. One

of them being I don't have all of my normal setup. The other being an advantage, which is I have all these gadgets to use that I can, you know, add to my new workflow for the next month. However, I quickly learned that even if I'm surrounded by a bunch of gadgets, doesn't mean necessarily that I know how they're all connected and even where the power buttons are on some of these things. And so it was interesting, but he's got this lovely tower over here that I thought, uh, surely it should do something more useful than only running windows. And so, uh, he was kind enough to tell me that there was an SSD in there, totally blank, that I could just throw Neon onto. So I thought we should do that. One of the, I think, hesitations I had, and you both made me feel better about this, was the

last few times I've installed Linux, Ubuntu specifically, aside a Windows installation, Ubuntu specifically, aside a Windows installation, it's kind of messed with some of the bootloader stuff and was problematic. Now, I have no evidence whether or not I did screw it up. We're going to find that out later. But that was one of my hesitations. So at first I was thinking, you know, I took the case apart, opened it up, and I was like, I'm just going to unplug the serial ATA cable. But that I think is an indication of the type of hardware I'm used to, which is not exactly super modern hardware. Because I had the case open and I was like, there's no cables. It's all just M.2 drives and stuff. So I figured I had to do it some other way, which is perhaps more risky. So I gave it a shot. So I'm just in the BIOS now. Thankfully,

I figured out how to use this keyboard. It's got like a bunch of modes to switch to different, I guess, Bluetooth devices or whatever. So I finally got the keyboard working after figuring out how to get the monitor working. How it is when you're not with your own things. how it is when you're not with your own things and now i'm seeing a linux boot manager being uh reported here so i'm wondering if that sandisk that extras ssd oh it's a samsung ssd okay so the sandisk is obviously my usb drive interesting so i'm only seeing one of the sandisks listed here but there's two entries for lin boot manager, which is very interesting. So I wonder if there's already a Linux on there. Anyways, investigations.

I wonder, are you seeing in there maybe an entry from a previous install that Alex had on that machine? I was thinking it might have been that, but the partition manager didn't show anything. It showed just no file system at all on that SSD. I would assume he wouldn't do that. He's Alex. So he would fill a drive as soon as he bought it, but could be, could be that has since vanished because of course I've made some progress, but when you're on a new system, you got to kind of poke around and hopefully not screw things up. Ghost in the firmware. But I was able to eventually, you know, get things set up properly in the BIOS and make a little bit of progress. Okay. I was able to figure out the boot priority,

which is great. So I'm booting off my little USB drive that has the neon image loaded onto it. And UEFI, it complained that the system was shut down many times unsuccessfully I don't know what that's about this is the first time I gave it a try and so I got the Neon boot menu which is great

a grub menu which is great so I just selected, you know let's go for it and now I was hoping this would figure itself out while I was recording this, but now it is just a blank screen. This is not feeling very good. So more work to do. Uh-oh.

That doesn't seem like it went well. Blank screen? I'm sure some of you are like, oh yeah, of course. It's like, this is probably exactly what happened, but it kind of made me realize that I've been working with mostly laptops for the last like five years and not very fancy ones. So I knew, okay, well that's obviously I can just give it a shot in safe graphics mode, but then I had quite a blank on where to go from there. So, um, anyways, I tried the safe graphics mode.

I think we have some partial success. I suspected it might be a display issue. This display is one of those big, massive, fancy curved ones. And so I'm currently booted into the safe graphics option. It doesn't look great on this monitor, but it's working. So hello, Neon. All right. I mean, at least you got a desktop, I suppose.

But it's like got to be super, super tight on that safe graphics mode. It was like 1024 by 768, totally stretched into this like super wide landscape mode. It was it still made me feel good because I was at least you know able to do some things but man after a little bit of just watching that my eyes were getting a little squirrely i like the idea too you install you go to the trouble of installing a distro to get like the latest and greatest that kde plasma has to offer just to also experience it in the lowest possible resolution in 2020 well yeah that's a thing though it, that's not a great experience. And I wonder, is it a combination of just maybe monitoring graphics card where just needed more advanced feature sets than what the free stuff offered? That's just

not a great experience for you out of the box. I would say it wasn't. Thankfully, I am not new to running into sort of issues at first, right? Especially on hardware, I don't know very well. sort of issues at first, right? Especially on hardware, I don't know very well. So it was a bit of a Matlock situation, you know, trying to ask, okay, well, what part could it be? Start at level one, you know, is it plugged in? That's pretty important. So not new to kind of troubleshooting in that way, but it was a little disconcerting because I was on a deadline and was feeling a little bit of stress to get this thing going, considering I was going to, you know, this machine is primarily, its use case is going to be recording the podcasts and streaming some of the video that we do on the stream. So it's

going to be pretty important. I finally at least got that video going, but I did start running into other problems. And of course, just as I get things booted up, the mouse dies. And I need to figure out a way to recharge the battery. It's got, I think, a USB-C port on it. And I'm looking here, and there's a desk full of a great many cables. We have pies plugged in, and audio interfaces, and hard drives, and oh, so many so many things uh i can't seem to find a usbc cable so oh man now i'm starting to feel pretty stressed oh man that's frustrating when it's like i'm just trying to get this thing online i got a live stream to do and i can't

now my mouse has died that that actually happened to me yesterday when we were going to jump on our call my mouse died so I now have just a little cord that hangs off my launch keyboard right here that I just plug the mouse into but you know um off to your I think it's your left there Alex has a USB no your other left uh Alex Alex has a USB-C cable run along the side of the desk there oh where. Where you're sitting. So there's a cable over there. I pulled a lot of cables in trying to get all this working, so I don't know what's happening.

I know because I had my devices plugged in there when I was sitting there when we were in Raleigh. So I have the same problem. He's going to get it back and everything's going to be so different. It's going to take you the rest of the trip just to put everything back in working order for Alex. Oh, don't put put it back you know i i will say he's got a great setup there's a lot of cables like neatly tucked and just poking out a little bit so that you could plug them in for this kind of use uh however like this one over here is a usb b this one over here is a thunderbolt one and uh so i just anyways i was i eventually found one way over there and

so it had like two or three dongle like connectors to make it work but i figured it out i got the mouse charging but then i ran into you know that risky part of like how not to wipe all of Alex's stuff. Okay I think I'm just gonna try and install from this safe graphics mode. It feels a little risky but starting to run out of time here so I'm gonna try that. In the installer I can see there is an SSD 970 EVO plus 2 terabyte and there's an SSD 970 EVO Pro 512. And from what the installer is suggesting, the 512 says just free space. That seems exactly like what Alex described. And the 2TB, or nearly, suggests that there's an NTFS partition on there. So that seems fine. Still feels risky.

I don't want to screw up this machine. It's not mine. And I'm sure I don't know what Alex's backup state is like. So I'm going to do a little bit of extra investigating. See what I can find out. You're very generous. I would have assumed, oh, he left this drive for me. I just would have gone to town. I have a great story about

one time I was trying to fix someone's computer and they were running Outlook and Outlook was like maxed out because back then... No, the PST file could only hold like two gigs or something like that. Yeah, you know exactly this one. So it was a boss of mine at the time and I was

young. I was like 16. And I was like, oh, so it was a boss of mine at the time and I was young, I was like 16 and I was like, Oh, that's an easy solution. You have like two gigs. Oh, well it wasn't two gigs. You have like, you know, 500 bags worth of stuff in your trash. So I just deleted his trash. And then, so this was my boss at my very first job at a gas station. And he said, you didn't delete my trash, did you? And my heart sunk as I did. I just figured that would be an easy way to clear some faces that that's where I keep all my stuff. Wow. So then I spent several hours trying to get it back and I did, thankfully. Wow. But that taught me don't just trust that a standard workflow is okay.

So, you know, be extra cautious with other people's things because you never know how they use their computers. Just didn't trust folders? That's why I keep, you know, I keep my fresh produce in the compost because the fridge, it just doesn't work. Well, there's a nice quick, like, shortcut key for the trash, you know, to move things to that folder quickly. So it seems convenient. Yeah. But anyways, I did a little bit more poking around and things seemed fine. So in my hard drive investigations, I've discovered some things.

There is, I guess, a boot partition. a boot partition and the os i believe on this toshiba 1.75 terabyte which is not any of the ssds i just mentioned i suppose that's fine uh the other thing is um upon looking at the smart properties for this guy uh it reports a temperature of a minus 273 degrees c, which if I'm not mistaken, is just about zero Kelvin. So he's got some pretty amazing cooling in this thing, I think. Wow. Yeah, that's some great cooling. It's this modern technology, right? All right. So maybe the smart data is a little off. I'm sure it's fine. It's fine. But I was at least happy to find, you know the the boot partitions and stuff that I was expecting

previously I wasn't finding that so then I was like I'm just gonna go for it I'm really really running out of time now and so I did some installing um but then I realized I gotta solve this graphics thing there's no way I'm we're gonna be able to do some streaming with this crazy graphic situation so um I had to call you both up call a friend style okay well i've called in the team uh i have zero experience with uh let's call it premium hardware or at least getting some nvidia graphics to work so i've called in i'm calling a friend, Chris and Wes. And so far they have many suggestions. So I'm going to try a whole bunch of those. Stay tuned.

Millionaire style, call a friend. Do, do, do, do, do, do. And then we began to pepper you with suggestions. It's true. Too many and so many. And they were all great. However, I did discover that there was some disparity between the tutorials you were sending me and KDE Neon, which turned out to be interesting. Right.

All right. Well, you know, it's Ubuntu base, but it doesn't have all the same KDE Neon, right? And thus, some of the tutorials thatris is sending me don't apply that easily but west did suggest running ubuntu drivers auto install and that might just kind of take care of it but we were worried that it wouldn't install the non-free driver uh so i was able to run uh ubuntu drivers auto uh no sorry ubuntu drivers devices which lists the what it's going to do. And it's suggesting the NVIDIA driver 515 distro non free recommended. So I'm assuming that'll install the non free one when we run auto install. I'm hoping it's gonna work. So I'm gonna try this now. I'm glad you were able to catch that and didn't just end up installing the free driver,

which is probably what you already had. Yeah, that was your suggestion, which was a good one, because I think not knowing that, I wouldn't have known what to look for. So that was a good tip on your head. But the key thing there, it sounds like, is to realize that Neon doesn't ship with the Ubuntu driver's tool. That's it. Yeah. And so I suppose I could have found the graphical driver's tool and installed it, but it seemed, you know, just as easy to go the West route. This is, I just, I like to just kind of zoom it on that because A, it's nice to know there is a command line way you can do it and you don't need the graphical tool. But B, that's exactly the kind of thing, like exactly that I would have missed in my review of Neon because I installed that two years ago, three

years ago. I don't know how long it's been. And I just completely forgot that it doesn't come with Neon anymore because I just sort of solved that problem. That's really kind of the interesting difference between a new eyes review and a long time review, because I can tell you, oh yeah, there's ways to fix that. And you, it won't be a problem long-term anymore. Like once you've solved it once it's done. Right. But it's good to know that some of those things you depend on even though it is an ubuntu base doesn't necessarily have by default yeah and that's one place where you can get caught is um you know if you if you know enough to know it's an ubuntu base which is fine going out and looking for a bunch of tutorials might not necessarily

give you the solution so i mean that's kind of what you get with using a distro that's a little bit niche and that's fine but for me i think um playing with some more high-end graphics you know nvidia stuff was new to me um so thankfully i had you know two mentors to guide me through that and it was relatively painless without that i think i would have struggled a little bit more so but anyways after that um i was able to get uh first boot going and found some success trending again okay we have first boot which is really great uh now i am just uh running that driver sudo sudo buntu drivers install And let's see how that goes. Command not found.

Oh, I mistyped it. I'll report back in a sec. Oh, look at you. Oh, I can hear little Archie in the background too. Hey, Archie. Oh, yeah, he's, you know, a companion. Keep the spirits high. You need someone to give you good advice. This means all three of us are podcasting with dogs.

We should change the name of the show. And change our video shots too, probably. Right, they should be the dogs, right. So after installing the graphics drivers and doing a quick reboot, everything was perfect. Turned out really great. But I did start to run into a few other issues that seemed maybe less software based, maybe a bit more hardware based. You know, this is mildly embarrassing,

because it seems obvious now, but we have lovely graphics. And then I was thinking, oh, no, all I see is background, but it's extending to the left. And so obviously, But it's extending to the left. And so obviously, this other monitor is also connected to this computer. So I just need to figure out how to turn that one on. We'll get there. But anyways, yeah, welcome to a modern Brent. You're set up now.

You got a big, powerful workstation. You got your fancy screens. You know, I thought it was going to be obvious because I have one monitor here in front of me and another one to the right. And I was like, oh, yeah, OK, well, you know, it's just not quite, you know, the default setup is not quite. So instead of being on the left, it's on the right. But it wasn't that obvious because I brought up the, you know, the display manager. You could drag them around and stuff like that. And it wasn't even this monitor.

It was the TV over there in the other side of the room that was plugged in. Oh, Alex! And it was set default as my primary monitor, so all my toolbars and stuff were on there. I love it. You could be podcasting from the couch right now, and you are not. Missed opportunity. Put the chat room on the TV. That's what you do,

right? Right. So, anyways, I traced a few cables and got this other one plugged in and unplugged that TV and everything was just fine. Oh, good. And now you're going to, I guess, probably get to know Neon a little bit. Really, it's just get to know Plasma. It's the latest Plasma. That's it. Yeah, I did find a bug or two, as I may, that were pretty minor, but we'll see if we can report on those in a bit. But I'm excited to give this a tour for the next month. I think so far it's quite performant, really working nicely. And I mean, as a Plasma fan, having modern Plasma is just a treat. And I'll point out, if you were on an AMD hardware stack with a GPU or an Intel hardware stack, especially for graphics, right?

You wouldn't have had that reduced graphics mode. You wouldn't have had that GPU issue. It's also not your hardware, right? So probably if you had like, oh, I bought a new graphics card and I'm going, you would have had like a period where you were expected that you were going to go through this troubleshooting where you're just kind of just jumping in with like, I don't know what I have or how to make it work. Yeah.

It was kind of all of the mystery all at once, for sure. So I'm going to be interested to hear your thoughts in a few days, even not to mention a few weeks on what it's like using it ongoing, because you're on the precipice of 526 getting released. It's a pretty significant update. Lots of nice things in there, at least. They've been crazy smooth for me. The biggest problem I've had in the last few years using KDE Neon on this machine that update lots of nice things in there at least uh they've been crazy smooth for me the biggest

problem i've had in the last few years using kde neon on this machine that i use practically daily i use it six days a week it's like you know every now and then after an update my background wouldn't load that seems minor but it works great and i i keep it up to date fairly routinely but i'm not super religious about it i fall behind sometimes and it still does just fine. The experience of using KDE Neon is the experience of using Plasma. It doesn't feel like a distro with a brand. It doesn't, it's not, I mean, it almost doesn't even feel like a distro. It feels like a, it's a meta desktop in a way. It's Ubuntu with a rolling Plasma environment. I don't think it's even fully a distro necessarily. Yeah, and you get that because like tutorials and stuff.

Now, Brent, you ran into some issues there, but to Chris's point, at least with like a longer live system, usually once you've kind of got a little more of your base system built out, you forget that you're not on a standard Ubuntu release for the most part. Totally. That's exactly, that's a good way to put it. It's like once you get that stuff figured out, it's just going to run like an Ubuntu LTS would, only eventually they'll also roll it to the newer LTS. I've gone even crazier and I've done things like now I have that Ubuntu tool that lets me install my own kernel. So I have like the absolute latest Linux kernel too. And that kind of helped with performance on my machine. But I think you're

really going to enjoy it. At least I hope, because I know you like Pl on my machine but i think you're really going to enjoy at least i hope because i know you like plasma and so i think you're really going to like this because it's i think it's a really good presentation of where the plasma desktop is going and what's nice about this is you can see where they're at right now today like when i talk about my steam deck in a little bit well the version of plasma that's on my steam deck was technically released in October of last year. It had a security patch in January, so it's been updated as of January, but the major release came out in October. And so there's just stuff missing in their Plasma image that my desktop has right now. And it's nice to see where they're going because there's so much

work being done on the Plasma desktop. And it's such an awesome workstation OS. I'm almost positive it's what we're going to use as our desktop environment when we redo all the studio machines now. All our production machines I think will be Plasma. In part because I just love KWin and I love the KWin rules. That's very true.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And unplugged go there to get 100 and 60 day credit on a new account and you can go there to support the show linode is fast reliable cloud hosting the linux geeks cloud we've been using it for oh my gosh can i almost start saying three years now i gotta do the math on that i love linode and i think you will too I have had friends who've been using it for a decade. They've been around for nearly 19 years. They are fast, reliable cloud hosting with 11 data centers around the world. Linode is great for performance hounds, for those of you that want a great value, for people that want a backend infrastructure for their business,

or just an individual's website, a portfolio, a blog. With pricing 30 to 50% cheaper than the hyperscalers out there that want to lock into their crazy platforms you're going to love it and with that hundred dollars you can really try it and that's the difference linode recently rolled out cali linux support so that way you can test your security and of course they always have the absolute up-to-date distributions including the latest alma rocky, Rocky, and others. They'll even let you do a custom install. A couple of times now, I've had to just take it down to the metal and install a custom distro, once for a crazy VPN solution and once to install NixOS, which, I mean, doesn't

feel so crazy. And if you ever run into any troubles, you ever have any problems getting set up, they have tons of guides, tons of tutorials, but also Linode comes with amazing 24-7 customer support by phone or by ticket. You're going to get the help you need. And they also have a really large community, including lots of members in our community. In fact, Linode has invested in the Jupyter Broadcasting community multiple times over, and they're doing it once again this year by making it possible for us to go down and visit JPL. And they're doing it once again this year by making it possible for us to go down and visit JPL. And we're not the only ones they support.

Media and free software, Linode support runs deep in the community. In fact, that's how I first discovered them. They were making it possible for Texas Linux Fest to go. Linode is dedicated to offering the best in virtualized cloud computing. If it runs on Linux, it'll run on Linode. Go see why we love it. Go see why so many in our community love it. go get that $100. Sign up today at linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 60 day credit on your new account and support the show. linode.com slash unplugged. Chris, I was wondering if you have done one of those LTS to LTS updates on to go in and repair that.

And I don't actually think that's a Neon problem. I think that was an apt issue. And the machine itself is so old. So yeah, I've had a few package updates break on me, and I don't really think it's Neon so much. I was just checking checking and I just did an ls on var log installer which is a directory that the ubuntu installer leaves on your hard drive and the files in there were created January 29th 2018 that's when I installed this machine

so the fact that twice I've had to like go fix my boot manager after a upgrade failed that's not so bad I've almost always universally done them from the command line too. I may have done one upgrade from the GUI. There was one update where they added new upgrade notifications. And so that time I upgraded using the GUI, but otherwise all other times

I've just upgraded from the command line. And you complain about a lot of broken stuff in the studio, but it's not usually that machine. Right. Out of all the things that are breaking, it is generally not the Neon machine. I will say, Brent, probably you probably will find more bugs than maybe you're used to on a

more, you know, like on a more static release. Oh, I'm used to finding quite a bit. But the difference with Neon is that instead of it being like, I've suffered with this bug for the past six, nine, three years or whatever, in a few weeks you'll notice like, oh, if it got patched in the latest point release, then it's gone. You might have a new bug to replace it, but it feels fresh in that way. Or put another way, Brent could actually file a bug against an issue he found, and he could see the results of that more immediately, right? That's an opportunity for our QA in chief to actually contribute a

little bit to the Plasma desktop if you have time, because that's actually the team that's fixing these problems. Yeah, that feedback loop is actually really helpful because I've certainly filed a few bugs in the past and, you know, made sure I was as up to date as I possibly could be on that system. And then the developers just being like, oh, yeah, we fixed that weeks ago. You just got to wait. So I'm looking actually quite a bit forward to this to continue my journey of being more involved in open source projects. I think this is actually a perfect way to continue those contributions. Well, that's enough of Brent's hardware struggles.

I think we need something of maybe a hardware success story. And you, Chris, you, my friend, you've been waiting patiently for something I thought might never arrive. I was bracing for November. You know what I mean? I had prepared myself mentally that my Steam Deck wasn't going to arrive until like November. What is so crazy about the timing, Wes, is the night that the Steam Deck arrived, another device just showed up that's been missing the original Nvidia Shield Portable here which was essentially a controller with a clamshell screen that ran Android actually an awesome device pretty powerful for the time came out in 2013 almost nine years ago and they last updated Android on this in 2016, which the servers are still online.

You can still get the latest update. I had to do it because the thing sat in a box for five years. This was my favorite portable machine at the time because it could sideload your favorite emulators. You had access to the Play Store. You had access to Nvidia Shield streaming. And it's legitimately a pretty fast Android device. I mean, at the time, right? I mean, that's about the closest thing you get to a portable Linux gaming device for a long time. Totally, it was. It absolutely was. And it was great for what it was. I loved it. And my son and I, we'd love to play this, you know, retro games on this. So this was by far one of my favorite portable gaming devices of all time,

this Nvidia Shield Portable. I'll put a link in the show notes if you're not familiar with it. What are the chances that the same day I get my Steam Deck, a device that's a 2022 take on kind of the same idea, what are the chances I get that at the same time I rediscover after five, six years, we find the NVIDIA Shield in a box? And what a unique opportunity to look at two ends of this spectrum at the same time. And I'm going to tell you, there is a couple of things that the NVIDIA Shield still does better. I'll tell you what they are in a moment. And of course, there's things that obviously the Steam Deck does better.

things that obviously the steam deck does better that's kind of a given since the steam the steam deck has essentially an hp dev 1 crammed inside of it so it's not surprising sure does yeah it's got a 1280 by 800 ips screen with 400 nit brightness it's a gorgeous screen four core eight thread amd zen t2 cpu which has an 8-core AMD RDNA graphics card with 1GB of dedicated memory. It's got 16GB of system RAM, and you can either get it with 64GB of eMMC storage, 256GB of

NVMe, 512GB of NVMe, which is the one that I have. Oh, baby. I had to go big, right? I got a lot of games. And then 40 watt hours of battery life i'll put a link to the ifixit teardown in the show notes if you're interested on like the you know the guts of this thing out of the box feels really high end it's lighter than i expected but i have held one before but it still actually surprised me when i took it out of the box it

comes with a nice carrying case it overall just it feels like like if you bought a nintendo switch if you ever buy if that it's i'd say it's even a nicer experience than buying a nintendo switch device setup is super smooth they've nailed it i had a little bit of a software update i had to do right away but it updated quick it rebooted I was in the new OS pretty quickly. And then it took me only a moment to switch it to the beta channel because of course I did. And then I did another update, rebooted. I have to say, I really like the UI

that they've come up with. It is not big picture mode. It's something different. And I really, I think it's pretty great. It is super easy in that UI to determine what games work good on the deck and which ones are a little sketch so you're going to have a good time undoubtedly one of the nicest things about it

while i'm talking about positive stuff is that if you've bought a steam game before you've already got games that work on it when you buy a switch there's no games on it right when you buy another console there's no games on it when you buy a another console, there's no games on it. When you buy a Steam Deck, you got your entire effing Steam library. That's pretty great. Plus, it even has your save points if your games support Steam Cloud. So I launched a game on here,

and it was right where I left off when I had played on the PC like three months ago. I mean, that's a great experience. That really, especially, you know, you've already paid a bunch of money for these games. Now you've invested in a, in a brand new hardware thing. You're kind of wanting to make sure you get your value out of it.

And I think you do. They also have in steam, in the steam, big picture mode, whatever that's called. I know they have a name for it, but you know, their new big picture mode,

they also have Chrome that you can install. So even if you don't want to drop to desktop mode you could just use chrome in the big picture mode which is kind of neat and it's full chrome like i went to linux unplugged and everything and it worked so that's the big picture mode i think you could probably find lots of people to talk about it you've probably heard the game reviews of course it plays games fine it's a 720p screen i mean you can i put almost all my games on ultra mode and they play just fine damn am i impressed though at some of the nicest fanciest windows games are actually running just fine on the deck and then like old games age like i just played age of empires on this thing and it did great it worked great for playing age of empires the trackpads you get used

to it they're not so bad when you're gaming. You have lots of options. You have every input option under the sun, including the touchscreen, which you end up using a lot. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you go to desktop mode. So let's talk about desktop mode, because I think that's what we care about.

So like I mentioned, Plasma 5 23.5, last updated January 4th of 2022. Linux 5.13 with Valve 21-1 patch set x11 desktop not wayland did we know that i think so but just confirming it is x11 when you switch to plasma in fact the way you switch to desktop mode is you hold down the power button for a few seconds and if you just tap the power button it goes to sleep right away if you hold down the power button for a few seconds. And if you just tap the power button, it goes to sleep right away. If you hold down the power button, you get a menu, you know, typical stuff. And one of them is switch to desktop mode. There's really no other place in the UI to do that.

So you gotta know to hit that power button. When you choose desktop mode, it's the sensation of switching into like another X environment. You get like a whole moment where it's like loading up a window session. So it's, I think when they're in their big game mode or whatever, it's in its own X environment. So it does take a few seconds to activate the desktop. And it takes a few seconds for some of the hardware to come available. I've had to wait up to a minute before the mouse becomes available, the trackpads.

I've had to wait up to a minute before the mouse becomes available the trackpads and as plasma is loading you see like audio device notifications like this audio device is just connected so it's it's interesting how it's doing that but once you're there it's a plasma desktop it's a minimal plasma desktop you can install anything that's a flat pack and that's pretty nice where it goes south and i hate to say this because i'm sure the developer team actually worked pretty hard on it but oh my god the virtual keyboard is so bad under plasma it's so bad they so they clearly want you to use your thumbs on both trackpads of the right and left trackpad and then they want you to like aim in on the keys and then like tap, tap, tap, tap on them. And they want you to use your right thumb for the right

side of the keyboard. They want you to use your left thumb for the left side of the keyboard. And you're kind of supposed to sit there and whiz through the keyboard with the thumb pads. But because the thumb pads are only really just maybe slightly larger than the size of my thumb, I have to constantly raise my thumb to reset and get more trackpad. When you raise your thumb, it resets the focus point back to the bottom of the keyboard. Oh, man.

So you lose your distance. So, like, a funny one is, like, say you're saying yes to a command prompt. So you go to use the right thumbpad, but before I can get to the Y, I run out of trackpad. So then I lift my thumb to get a little more track pad, and then it resets the focus point all the way to the bottom of the keyboard again. And I sit there and I keep trying to get to Y, but I never have enough distance. So then like an animal, I go to

peck at him because you can touch it, but you really got to push it. Like it's almost like it's a capacitive screen. Remember those old touchscreens before smartphones? Industrial style. But it's not a capacitive screen. I don't know why you got to press that hard. And it still sometimes doesn't register. It's awful. And the combo of the various different input limitations using touchpad or touchscreen or whatever you're doing,

touchpad or touchscreen or whatever you're doing the combination of their various limitations makes inputting complicated passwords unbelievably frustrating like wow unbelievably frustrating so painful so painful that you'll either just give up on the desktop mode altogether or you'll like pair a bluetooth keyboard or hook up a usb keyboard and just use a physical keyboard because it's excruciating and i don't really understand why it's so bad. And then to make things worse, if you don't have Steam running, it doesn't seem like the virtual keyboard works at all. And if Steam can't connect to the Internet because maybe you're not on Wi-Fi, keyboard doesn't work at all. So I had no keyboard if I didn't have Internet because I couldn't be signed into Steam. So therefore, the keyboard wouldn't launch because it seems like the keyboard's a Steam app or something like that if I didn't have internet because I couldn't be signed into Steam, so therefore the keyboard wouldn't launch

because it seems like the keyboard's a Steam app or something like that. I don't know. I don't know. But that was very beta. You know what I mean? I suppose that makes sense. If you're going to have polish in one area,

you want it in the gaming experience, I guess. But it's interesting as a Linux enthusiast sort of in the field to report that, I guess, yeah, this is where the rough edges are at the moment. Yeah. And I don't really know, maybe they could have just shipped any free software virtual keyboard. It may have been a lot better. Because the other thing it totally screws up is it's trying to figure out where the content is in a terminal. But it doesn't know where it's going to be. So say you want to try out Pacman, because you want to see what it's like to do a Pac-Man update. And so you're doing your Pac-Man

SYU. Well, first of all, it took you about six minutes to type out Pac-Man dash capital S lowercase Y-U, and then you hit enter, but now you can't see it because the output is now under the keyboard. So you clear the keyboard. Keyboard comes back next time you need to like say yes to the prompt. And it wants to help you out. So the keyboard now pops up at the top of the screen because now the content of the terminal is at the bottom of the screen. So then when I hit yes, of course the terminal then scrolls up with new information,

like the packages that are going to be updated, which is now covered by the keyboard. So then I have to turn the keyboard off and I have to re-invoke the keyboard. But this time, this time, because the prompts at the bottom of the terminal, it's still not quite guessing it right. So it covers up the content I need to read. So I got to then turn the keyboard off, read the content, remember what I got to say yes to, then turn it back on and try to guess the right prompts of yes. So what I usually would do is like, okay, I think it's asking for my pseudo password. So I'll type that in now. And now it's asking if I want to update

these packages. So I'll just hit yes now. And then I'll clear the keyboard and see if I guessed it all right. And that's the actual process of using the virtual keyboard on the Steam Deck. And by the way, when you try to update with Pac-Man, it just yells at you that everything's read-only and you can't. All that for nothing. Have you thought about just SSHing in at this point? Because that might be easier. I actually was trying to get Pac-Man working because I was going to install SSH for you so you could play around. I was going to invite... Right. I was thinking about you.

But the thing is, is I couldn't get that far. If you want to install a Flatpak app, no problem at all. But you want to use Pac-Man, you're getting read-only errors. I wasn't sure if maybe they'd have like a user area you could write to or something like that but although i wonder about nix in my home directory right running the nix package manager out of my home directory i knew that was going to come up at some point it had to i gotta try that i do have to try that but as far as actual desktop performance as a desktop machine, it's fine.

It's like a laptop. You'll hear it kick up, but the fans are pretty pleasant. It does get pretty warm to the touch, but it's not impossible to hold. It's still fine. And on the edges where you grip, you don't really have heat. It's really in the center where all of the parts are. And it does have a fan right here on the back. So if I turn it towards me, I get a little bit of, you know me i get a little bit of you know i get a little bit of a hair dryer effect going from it but you could absolutely because i've

done bits and pieces of this hook it up to a usbc dock and have an external monitor external keyboard external mouse peripherals you could have an audio interface everything because i've used my launch keyboard right here as a bit of a USB hub because it has USB A and C ports and it's a USB-C cable. I hook it into the deck. I can keep connecting devices. Everything works. And in the show notes, I will link to a known good USB-C hub.

I have one on order myself. It has Ethernet. It has DisplayPort or HDMI. I can't remember. But it has everything you need because the deck only has one USB-C port. But you could plug all that in and you've essentially created yourself a docking station. And this thing is a full-fledged PC with a second monitor. You can actually use the Steam Deck's internal screen as your second display.

So you could have an external monitor as your primary display, and then the deck is your secondary monitor. Then you disconnect that USB-C dock, and it's just all on the deck. And that is pretty compelling. The downside is it's a read-only file system, which is tricky to work with. And if you reboot when you're in the desktop mode, it reboots back into the game mode. when you're in the desktop mode it reboots back into the game mode not the desktop makes sense right you can see why they do that for average users you're going to want to get back you think if okay if i reboot i'll get back to the gaming mode that's exactly what they'd want to have happen but if you're using it as a desktop and you're in the desktop mode and you reboot it goes back into a gaming device. It might not be what you want.

So you negligently decide that you're going to try to do a live stream from the deck. You're like, real quick, I'm going to reboot, get ready. And then you have to set everything up again. I mean, that seems like a pretty fair limitation. The battery life could be better as well. I mean, as a desktop, it's fine. But when you're using it to play video games, I mean, what do you expect, right? It gets about three to four hours. It's going to get warm.

I don't know, man. I mean, that's just kind of what the technology is at right now. They could put a bigger battery in here, but it's going to cost more. It's going to be thicker. It's going to be heavier. After three hours, you might want to go outside. Who knows? Maybe.

Maybe. But the overall user experience for just gaming, taking out the desktop stuff, is perfect. They nailed it. They nailed it more than I thought they would. And I'm really happy I have it now. It's going to be, I think I am going to see a significant uptick in my home PC gaming. Because in my unique tiny living situation, I didn't have room for a gaming PC. So I was kind of gravitating towards things like the Nintendo Switch already.

Because, you know, I can have it hooked from a TV. We could do a little family gameplay. This is personal, like, portability. But it's for PC games. And I have to keep reminding myself, it's not an ARM device, guys. No. It's not an ARM device. I sit here and I'm like, I was looking at the kernel.

I'm like, but that's not an ARM. Oh, right. So I'm excited in that sense. Like, all right, I'm going to play some games. The other thing that's kind of nice is because the screen is 720, you install some of these older games I have. I have some of the Batman games and some of the Alien games. Some of them were made years ago, right?

But you could put them on max settings now, and they just play fantastic on this thing. I'm curious, Chris, you probably went into this with a particular vision of, yeah, okay, it's going to play games great, and it does. But a particular vision of the Linux desktop part of it, and maybe a use case that you had in mind. Is that vision now a little different now that you've had these experiences and where do you think that's going yeah i thought it'd be a great i mean surprise i i was picturing this as a perfect portable podcasting machine right usbc dock it has my audio interface and then you just run audacity on the screen and you know maybe like when we're in a hotel room or something this is all i need to record a podcast. And I definitely could do that.

But it's big, guys. It's big. Like it's a big device. It's huge. And it's like at this size, I would just rather have the dev one. I'd just rather have a laptop. That was going to be my next question because you were kind of like, you know, a few weeks ago, you were waffling a bit. You didn't know this was about to show up.

You were a little less enchanted with the idea after the Dev 1 came out. This is where I think the Shield does a couple of things better. The Shield is more portable because of its fold-up clamshell design. The portability of this is frankly a lot nicer. It is easier to move this around.

I actually kind of think this is a superior design nicer that it is easier to move this around i actually kind of think this is a superior design built around a game controller kind of the size of that original xbox chunky controller yeah just a little bit bigger the other thing this does i'm sad to say a little bit better than the steam deck is battery life and i am kind of appalled to say that because this is nearly a 10-year-old device. And it sat in a box dead for like five years, six years, I don't know, a long time. And it just got charged up. And now here I am. And the battery life lasts longer.

Now, the games are not as nice. The capabilities of Android, especially this genre of 2016 Android are really limiting. Like Google Play services crashes constantly. The Play Store is always asking me to reauthenticate. Android was such a hot mess back then. And ultimately it really, really stands out when you have an Android gaming device and a pure Linux play. The pure Linux play is so much better. It's so much simpler. I don't have to deal with crappy Google services. I don't have weird services that are just like airing out in the background and then I'm getting like error messages and stuff.

The whole setup process is so smooth. so smooth. Like when you launch a Proton game on this thing, they've got like custom splash screens for that game that tell you like, I'm installing the.NET redistributables and I'm taking care of this in this really nice way where it's also at the same time showing you all the controls. By the way, the controls, they're always

just like a button away on any game. You can hit a button and there's a little slide over that tells you what all the controls are for that game at any point. Oh, nice. Yeah. There's all that kind of stuff. You can hold down the Steam button and like the x button and you can like or b or i don't know one of the buttons you can like force terminate games you can you can just tap the steam button you get a nice overlay experience on this it's so much better than the experience on the shield ever was so much better than any of these android devices that it makes these things look like silly toys. And this is like the premium polished product,

the steam deck. So in that regards, it kicks the shields, but, but in terms of total portability, like I can put in my bag and like, would be an awesome like podcast machine. I mean,

it's like night and day difference in size between these two things. And it's kind of crazy that the shield seems to be getting like two or three more hours of battery life. I mean, it's an old ARM device, but I mean, those differences stand out to me. But otherwise, I think the deck's a fantastic piece of hardware. They nailed it. And version two, if they get there, is really going to be something to see.

This is version one, and I think they pretty much hit every mark they were trying to hit with version one. And I think they pretty much they hit every mark they were trying to hit with version one. You've been looking at reviews of this thing for months now, so you probably weren't surprised by a lot of things. But was there anything that you were surprised by actually having it in your hands then? I think a lot of things that I wasn't sure about, I'm still a little unsure about is the trackpads for moving around. things that I wasn't sure about and I'm still a little unsure about is the trackpads for moving around. I think I get it. It definitely worked in Age of Empires. It seemed a little bit iffy on the desktop, so I wasn't sure how that was. I'm still not quite sure. I feel like it's just going to take time. But no, I mean, in particular, I got lucky because at a meetup, I got a chance

to play with one and see one. The desktop mode has been my favorite part of it i've really enjoyed that i i like just abused the hell out of my starlink over the weekend and just like installed terabytes of games i really did sorry elon that was me uh and that was that was fine right and i just went about using the system and what's kind of neat and i didn't know this before i got it so you're in that big game mode right and then you to desktop. Steam's still running in the background, so you can still keep downloads going. It's just the desktop Steam app now. And it just transforms to the desktop app, and there's your downloads, and I can see where the queue's at, and I can still use the chat app if I was mid-chat with somebody. That is very slick. Very, very slick. Yeah, it's great. And then you go back to game

mode, boom, you're all in the other interface bitwarden.com slash linux get started with a free trial of teams or enterprise today at bitwarden.com slash linux of course try it as an individual user everyone should have a password manager everyone i really think that's probably job number one when you're signing up for services and websites online. And I think Bitwarden is the one to go with. It's easy to get started. It's open source. It's trusted by millions of individuals in their communities. You have team support, organization support.

It's what we use to manage our passwords here on the show. It has nice features like account switching, auto username generation, along with password generation. And one of my favorite features, it can help keep track of my two-factor login. Bitwarden also gives me the confidence to use strong passwords with all of the applications I self-host. All of our web front ends that we log into, I mean, I probably have 15, 30 different apps that we self-host now. And if it wasn't for Bitwarden, I wouldn't feel comfortable as a team using really secure, complex passwords. And you just have to do it these days. And Bitwarden's always adding features to make it better and better. And the experience on mobile is absolutely the best. I have the most experience with iOS, some on Android, but the most with iOS. And the integration with the password

filling on iOS and Face ID makes getting your passwords on mobile so simple. And on Android, they're just as smooth. It's really an impressive set of dev teams they have for both the iOS and their Android side. Of course, they have a Linux desktop app as well. It's really easy to get started too. You can just go to bitwarden.com slash Linux and try it out for yourself and get a free account. And they're always adding new features. Their job is security and privacy. It's what they're focused on. It gives you a little bit of peace of mind. And maybe you have a password manager already,

but maybe someone you know, a friend or a family, or maybe your workplace isn't using the best password practices and isn't using the best password manager. Send them to Bitwarden. You'll know they'll be taken care of. You know they'll be safe. You know they're going to be way better off. Just tell them it's easy. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. And if you haven't done it yourself, try it out for yourself too. Bitwarden.com slash Linux.

Our first boost today comes from Marcel. Six days ago, Our first boost today comes from Marcel. Six days ago, 1,997 sets. For those who like Vim and Rebels, I can't recommend Vim, iPython, Cell highly enough. It works for more than just Python. And by the way, does West Coast Canada count as West Coast? When is the Canada meetup?

Rand, did you get him to boost this in? That's a really great question. I've been thinking about this for a few years, actually. You can't just have a Canada meetup. Have you seen a map? This is a relatively large piece of land over here. You're all spread out up there. I think West Coast does include Western Canada, but I don't think it does on this particular West Coast trip, mostly because we're leaving from the studio and headed south. But I don't see why we can't have a Vancouver meetup or something in the near future. Yeah, I would love that. Yeah. The only problem is we'll probably have to take the anti-vax wrap off of Joops.

I don't think they'll let us across the border with that. Right. And that flag is a little obnoxious too. And you're going to have to learn Vim because this honestly, thanks Marcel, this looks like a great pick. I've never played with it before, but we'll have it linked in the show notes because I definitely will be. Okay, one more boost for me right now.

Ricky Kressling six days ago. 1,111 Satoshis. Boost. Hey guys, I'm a long-time listener, but first-time booster. I'd love it if you guys could check out my relatively new app,

Furtherance, for a potential pick while you're sneaking in with the boost, so I like it. The time-tracking app that stores all data locally, no potential for snooping. And, of course, it's written in Rust.

And available on Flathub to keep things easy. Thanks for everything you do, Ricky. And written with GTK4. So this is really taking the most modern GNOME desktop technologies and bringing them together. And it looks like a freaking fantastic app. Beautiful UI. Tasks are saved in that local database with unlimited capacity.

They're grouped by name and date. Tasks can be edited after they're created. Settings to customize the view and defaults to your liking. And more features are coming. And he says, just open an issue if you'd like to see something. So we'll put a link to the Flathub and to the GitHub.

That looks really great. Yeah, sorry for butchering your name there, Ricky. This looks like a fantastic pick. And, you know, when we need to keep track of how long Brent takes to install things in the future, I think this is what we'll be using. We got a wonderful boost from Tim Apple. I wonder if that's the Tim from Apple, but who knows? Oh, it must be, right?

Sure, I would assume. Five days ago with 2,222 sats. And Tim simply says, happy Linuxing. Well, happy Linuxing to you, Tim Apple. Thank you. One of my favorite usernames. The Golden Dragon also wrote in five days ago with 2,222

sets. Ah, road ducks! Thank you very much. And here's something for your trouble. Wichita K's check-in for meet-up. Thanks for the show. You know, Wichita K's is 2,000 miles from the studio, Brent. I don't know if we're going to be

doing a meet-up over there anytime too soon, Golden Dragon. Yeah, someone asked me recently if we were going to head to Toronto, which is 3,000 kilometers away. So maybe someday we will, but not just this time. I don't know why we give our resident Canadian the boost with the tricky state names also. So I think that's Kansas for Brent's wisdom. Oh, right, right. Thank you.

Wachita! Wachita! The Golden Dragon sent in a double boost. Oh! Oh! With, as you may have predicted, 2,222 sats. Double boost for missing last episode's boost. Wes, do you have any learning tips for learning Pythons?

I mean, I don't know if I have any specific tips. It kind of depends on what you want to do, right? You and I have talked about this in detail. Yeah, it's a big topic. Maybe just go listen to Coder Radio, because there's been some good conversation about Mike's adventures down the road of Python in the past year or so as well. But come up with something that means something to you, you know, whether that's scraping stuff from a website,

automating something, just playing around in a terminal. There's a lot of ways to get started. I think last episode we touched on Jupyter Notebooks can be a nice way to make things a little more concrete. You can use the pick we just mentioned earlier today if you want to try that from Vim if you're already a Vim user. Yeah, you got to make it mean something to you so you're incentivized to get over the hurdles when things inevitably break or don't go your way the first time. Optimus Gray also boosted in four days ago with 22,222 sets. days ago with 22,222 sets. That seems like a grandpa duck, right? That's a big duck. That's what that is. Thank you, Optimus. Optimus writes, Brent, please enjoy playing with Alex's chair when he's out of town. Now, I happen to know that before Alex left,

you made sure there's a sign directly in front of Brent's face that says, do not touch the chair. It's there, isn't it? Actually, it clearly says, no touchy the chair. Have you touched the chair? I mean, rules are there to be broken, right? Yeah, or at least to be bent, right? I agree.

Good. I mean, I? I agree. Good. I mean, I want you comfortable. Thank you. Thank you. I think Alex might forgive me for keeping it to my own economics for a month. You know, don't want to strain my back. That's right. Yeah.

Eric, the one boosted in five days ago with 50 stats. B-O-O-s-t it wants to know if we've tried the nebula relay system that was released in 1.6.0 we haven't tried it but we did mention it because it was a highly requested feature and nebula is a fantastic project it is a great solution for building your own custom mesh vpn network could be fantastic if you have VPSs across multiple providers or something like that. So yeah, I definitely am a big fan. I haven't needed it yet because I don't have any ridiculous double NAT scenarios like a certain Mr. Fisher. So my NABL usage was fine before, but you're right. It's a very nice feature to have.

And for me, the type of devices I i use my mobile devices and different architectures set up time with tail scales like so quick it was just the right way for me to go especially on my ios devices and on my android devices but i could totally see you know a scenario where nebula would be the right choice neural p boosted in four days ago with a hot boost. Coming in hot with the boost. 8,192 sats. He says, Manjaro with plasma. That's the only way to fly. Thanks for the many years of Linux coverage.

Did that cross your mind at all, Brent Manjaro? I'm embarrassed to say that it didn't. And I'll put a little bit of that blame on you as well, because we should have thought of this. Maybe that's the next foray. I feel like I haven't touched Manjaro in too long, so maybe time to give it a spin again. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it, because I wanted to get your spin

on Neon for this episode. I wanted to hear what you thought about it, but you're right. I think you just want to see if it's actually well-suited for the studio. Give it some paces. Let Brent fail. I think we've got to get Brent trying out that new Arch installer. You know, if anyone's gonna break it, it's Brent. Better get him on the next installer

too, right? I mean, might as well spread it around. Gene Bean boosted in four days. Go with a thousand saps. I'm a Georgia boy, but I'll be in Portland July 24th through August 2nd just in case that lines up with your meetup plans. It doesn't, Gene Bean, but you is welcome up to the studio if you wanted to make the four and a half, five hour trek. It's aup plans. It doesn't, Gene Bean, but you is welcome up to the studio

if you wanted to make the four and a half, five hour trek. It's a nice drive. It is a nice drive. You'd be welcome to join us on a Sunday up here at the studio and crack open the grill. And then Gene double boosted in four days ago with 5,000 sats. Heck yeah, he says, so guys, do you not have monitorings on your disk spaces and your CPUs and your

memories? How come you didn't catch the Matrix Server disk being full? If not, hit me up. I'll help you build one. It doesn't have to be hard. It's not because it's hard. And to be clear, we do. We do have monitoring on there to a pretty large degree.

And also Linode comes with default monitoring that also is just there by default. The problem is when you're at 95% and you don't think you have anything more available, monitoring doesn't really get you anything, right? Like we knew this was going to happen. It was more of a, when was it going to happen? Also, I mean, there is the reality that my inbox is heavily filtered. Like, a lot of the automated stuff doesn't even make it to the first page of my inbox. So I kind of take that responsibility on, too.

That's sort of my bad. But we do have some monitoring on there. Could we have more? I don't know. Actually, I mean, maybe. But would I see the alerts? If I had a dashboard, maybe I would. And then Gene Bean comes in with the rare triple boost.

With a elite set of stats, 1337. Side note, I love being able to stream stats and do boosts so much that I am dealing with podcast apps that are notably subpar on iOS when compared to Overcast. I know exactly what you mean, Gene Bean. Although the trend has been, my friend, Mountain has been getting better and all the other apps have been getting better.

They've added new features as time has gone on. But there are things I miss from Overcast. The number one for me is the whole Overcast voice boost system and smart speed system. Obviously, Marco knew what he was doing there. But I love boosting. So I, like you, have switched to a different app. Ooh, here we've got a theme.

Gas money boosts! First one's from PL Trent. Three days ago, 5,000 sats. Just some gas money for Brent. And another from Michael B. Yesterday, 30k sats for Brent's travel pocket. Happy project time for you. Yeah, that's great. That'll be great, Brent. That'll be great. Impressive. I need to come down to the studio, hopefully before the trip. A, to get that dear laptop that's sitting there waiting for me.

And B, to see your friendly faces. Oh, we're going to have projects to do before the trip. So yeah, you're going to have to get here because we're going to have to, you know, that'll be great. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, thank you very much. CB wrote in with a nice amount of leet sets as well. I'd like to contribute in some way to the show or even participate, but I just can't make this Sunday time slot. That's okay. We record this thing so you don't have to be here. Plus, with ADHD, it's bad. I've got 80 of them. ADHD. I've got 80 of them, ADHD. I can never remember to write in about a specific topic that was discussed.

So I figured I'd boost in a Linux joke every once in a while. All right, let's see. You ready? I'm ready. Yeah. What's the only way to generate a truly random string? Well, I mean, the technical answer? You asked Chris to pronounce something.

Yeah. Oh, that's good. Let's go with that. That is pretty good. Is it a Chris pronunciation jab? Must be that. Put a Windows user in front of Vim and tell them to quit. Oh, okay. Fair. By the way, Linux Unplugged is my favorite LTS. Love the show. Well, thank you very much, CB.

That's great. You know what? I'll take a Linux joke from time to time. That's actually a lot of fun. We got a nice batch of thank you boosts too. We got 500 stats from Bronswig, who is coming in with a Boise check-in. User 659 streamed 100 stats while listening.,000 sats streamed from user 507.

1,200 sats from LTguy005. 500 sats from EricTheOne saying, go Brent, go! Love it, you got some support. And then the Value for Value legend, one of a club of legends on Value for Value, 3,690 sats from Mr. Koss P land. Thank you everybody very much for your support and your notes. One of the things we're discovering that we love about the boosts is that it

brings up random conversations that we never planned on having. So we love a good thought provoking boost. Also, I put my node link in the notes. Again, we could use some nice large inbound capacity because we're getting lots of boost these days. So we could use some big capacity channels. If you don't have a podcasting 2.0 compatible app, go grab one.

They got tons of features like the boostograms, chapters, host info, sat streaming, advanced search, value for value, transcripts, clips. I could go live streaming. I could go on and on. transcripts, clips, live streaming, and it could go on and on. Lots of options at newpodcastapps.com or if you just want to go the hardcore route, Boost CLI or Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z.technology

if you don't want to switch your app. Nice to see Antenapod getting some podcasting to-do features. They may have Breeze integration in the future. Now we have a pick that we're using right now to do the show. So this will be fun. Yeah, the pick is Droidcam. Something I'd played with years ago,

but had never really used in anger until this week. Full disclosure, I caught COVID. Not going to go bring that up to the studio. So for the first time in quite a long time I'm broadcasting from home today and well yeah okay I've got an audio setup figured out for LAN and you know just for regular old audio things but since we started doing video you know at least for Jupiter Tube it's nice it's nice to have I didn't want to I didn't want to bring a blank screen to the show but I didn't I didn't have blank screen to the show, but I didn't have any

better setup. What did I have? I had my Pixel 3 handy. And with DroidCam, that was basically all I needed. This is really a great idea, Wes, because probably a lot of us, the best camera we have is our smartphone camera. So does it show up as a device to the OS? How does that part work? Yeah, so there's a couple of options. By default, you get it installed. It's in the Play Store. It's in the App Store, actually, too, it looks like, though I have not tried the iOS version as yet.

And so you get a video stream, so you could just bring it into OBS that way if you're doing something like that. I went the USB route. So you do, at least on the Android side, you do need to enable USB debugging. And then they've got, for Linux, they've got a V4L2 loopback driver

that lets you kind of customize things, as well as a cute little Linux app that lets you mess with the white balance. You can sort of flip things vertically or horizontal, or even zoom in if you want to, which is pretty gosh darn handy as well. You can do a dramatic chipmunk zoom with DroidCam. The part that I was a little worried about right away

was like, what was the latency going to be like? But it's been surprisingly good. The other part that's nice is when you use their app, whether you use a direct USB connection or you use the wireless connection, it still creates a virtual device for you. So you don't have to worry about which way you do it. It just shows up.

You can import it into your Teams or your Skype or your, you know, whatever WebRTC app of the day that you happen to be using to connect with whoever you're talking with. That is such a great pick because a lot of us could use a better webcam, and I'm one of them and like upstairs i gotta i don't have the right lighting situation and like my built-in webcam on the laptops they just don't do it justice but i bet you the phone camera could handle that just fine so we'll put a link to droid cam in the show notes that's pretty great now the only trick i think you really ran

into is it does take a bunch of power so So you better get your phone charged or have a way to do power delivery and USB data. That could be tricky, I guess. Yeah. You know, if you're down at 15 or 20 percent, it might not last a while. I got over 50 before we started the show and it's only down to 47 percent. It looks like the client also reports. So it is charging. It's using a little more than it's charging, at least in my current setup. But I mean, at that rate, we could stream for hours. Yeah, that's pretty great. Well, we'll keep going. We do stream live over at Jupiter.Tube every single Sunday. I usually get the stream going around noon Pacific time.

I guess that'd be about 3 p.m. on the East Coast where Brent's at, right? Did I get that right there, Brent? The clock says yes. Hey, that's nice. It's nice when I get approval from Father Time. But of course, you know, you just grab the show whenever the heck you want by going to linuxunplugged.com.

Links to what we talked about today will be at linuxunplugged.com slash 467. And if you're ready to listen to something else, don't miss that gosh darn Linux Action News. That's a whole additional thing. It's like a different podcast. It's a whole other RSS feed. Way less nonsense, way more

facts. That's very true. There's a lot going on every week, and we try to capture the stuff that matters the most over there, so subscribe to Linux Action News as well. But for us, well, we're going to be back here at the same bat time on the same bat channel next week. We'll hope you join us. That mumble room will be open for you at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble and join our matrix.

Matrix is growing like crazy. 60 million active matrix users now. So join the Jupyter Broadcasting Matrix. We got a general chat. We got rooms for Linux Unplugged. There's even a Bitcoin room over there with some of the best discussion on the internet. So don't miss it. Our Matrix room is poppin'. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Unplugged, and we'll see you right back here next Sunday! Yeah!

Woo! you well brent you did the hard work you did it on a deadline but now you got yourself a podcasting machine for like the next month it's true but i'm gonna see it you know if it works really well i'm gonna see if maybe i can take it home with me. It's a little big, maybe, but we'll see. It's carry-on size, I think. Ship it. Just ship it. I mean, it might break, but... What is great is it didn't fail in the middle of our recording,

despite not us testing it. So that's something. I mean, we haven't saved what I recorded yet, so there's still time.