LINUX Unplugged - 468: The Read Only Scenario

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

A fundamental change is coming to desktop Linux, and Silverblue might be our hint at where things are going.

This didn't make it into the show. It's just not really on theme this week. But I think, Brent, you'd really appreciate this. The SATA hat. And there's a couple of these out there for the Raspberry Pi or the Rock Pi with varying degrees of success. But there's a new one out there that lets you put a whole stack of disks. Look at this thing. Up to four SATA disk drives connected to this hat that then connects to the Raspberry Pi 4.

And they're starting around $35. I don't know. Can't vouch for it. One thing I'm worried about is power. That's a heck of a lot of power, right? I was thinking this is going to be like an e-serial ATA, like the external version, where the drive's powered by something else and you're just making a connection. That would probably be a lot easier and much smaller and much better.

But this thing is like a drive, like it's a toaster right onto this, right? Yeah. Although on the bottom side, they do have a Molex power connector right there. And there is also a USB-A port. So now you need a power supply beside your Pi? Yeah. Yeah. You will need a standard external ATX power supply and it'll need to be at least 60 watts

if you're going to do all four drives. That's what's great about this, especially when you look at, they've got a photo here and we'll have a link in the show notes, set up with 3.5 inch drives plus you got your power supply. What are you saving? You still need a whole ATX case for this thing. And if you're going to sandwich all those drives together, I think

they recommend a fan too. Oh no. So you've basically at this point, just built the next Xbox PC. But slower. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hey, guys.

Well, guess what? Coming up on this week's episode, I've been wondering if we're witnessing the development of two kinds of Linux systems, one that's for tinkers and enthusiasts and one that's built to be absolutely bulletproof, but you have to totally change the way you've been using Linux. But just how practical are these systems, and what are their limitations for real users? So the three of us try switching our workflows over to Silverblue. We'll explain why.

We'll explain how it went for each of us, good and bad. And then I'll talk about why maybe I see a bit of a fork in the world of Linux coming up. And it's not like it's an overnight thing. It's not like it's happening right away. But slowly but surely, there does seem to be two different paths forward. And I think LATPACs play into this and SNAP packages and systemd and containers. They're all kind of coming together to create a new trajectory for a new kind of base operating system that's going to completely change the way you interact with your Linux system as a desktop user or as a server once it lands.

That's what we're going to be looking at. You know, no bigs. No big deal. Are you talking about Nix again? This feels familiar. Hey, hey, I didn't say it. No, no, but we'll get there. But before we go any further, we got to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room. Welcome in, everybody. Hello. Good evening. Hello, how are you doing? Hey, Brent. And last but not least, hey, Wes. Hello.

I love it because I feel like we've got more and more folks in the quiet listening just getting that high-quality, low-latency audio feed now. That's a special crew. And what I think is fantastic about that is they could always pop down into on-air if they needed to, or like in the post show, or if like in the future, they want to join us for an office hours or Linux Unplugged and they do want to join us in on-air,

they're all set up. That's pretty great. Details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble if you'd like to participate in our virtual lug. And I also want to say a big good morning over to Tailscale. This is a tool you've got to try. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard's noise protocol.

We love it. We use it. It'll change the way you work. It's, I love it so much. I have virtual machines. I have VPSs. I have physical machines. I have mobile devices on Tailscale.

So go say good morning to the folks over at Tailscale. Try it for yourself on 20 devices for free at Tailscale.com. Maybe let them know Linux Unplugged sent you. All right, and then one little other bit of deets that we're just going to be covering at the top of the show for a little bit as these events are super close. Just a few days away at this point, the London meetup is nigh. Very, very close.

Meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting for all of this and we're only feeling a little bit of fomo out here on the west coast there's there's gonna be like 150 people at that meetup i think i don't know for sure i think having it outside was a bit of brilliance that was a good idea because you're gonna need the space and then are we ready to announce this do you you think? How are you feeling? You good? I mean, I assume you looked at the... I looked at the thing. I made a couple of tweets.

If it's Chris Fisher approved, then who am I to object? He was waiting to see if it was Wes Payne approved. So I guess we'll just have to blame Brandon if it doesn't go well. Yeah, I don't even know what this is. Our JPL lottery is up and live at linuxunplugged.com slash JPL. So we have a West Coast road tour coming up. Long story short, at the end of that road tour, we're going to be at JPL, and we're going to get a special tour down at the Jet Propulsion Lab,

and we can bring about 15 of our friends. So what we're going to do is ask that you put your name into a virtual hat. We have a submission form that we have running on a Nextcloud instance of ours that we use for this stuff. And then we'll write like a little bot, like Wes is going to run like a little Python script or something. You know, he does how he does. You know him. And we'll pull a list of names and a list of backup names in case somebody can't make it. But we do ask that if you do fill out the form please only fill it out if you are in the area and can actually make it to the event because there are just so few slots available

it's fine if you got to travel to be there but you have to you know be able to make it and so uh we will probably run that as the event gets closer and then we'll get everybody notified so that way they can make the travel plans so linuxunplugged.com slash JPL for the lottery to get into the JPL tour. And again, if you're just on the West Coast between Seattle and Pasadena and you'd like to do a meetup, we have a whole bunch scheduled and all the details are at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. All that's over there. There's a lot going on.

I feel like we should start collaborating and planning on our end a little bit on the trip deets. Very much so. We did get a team Airbnb, so that's all settled and figured out. We got to dial in when Brent gets here before the trip because we got the studio projects we got to do. That's true. Brent may be just learning this, but he didn't object, so I think we got him. That's how it goes. We got a whole lot of stuff to plan, really. There's still so much, but it's going to be

really exciting. My understanding is we're still going to make some shows during these events. So we got to think about that probably. It's going to be really good actually. So to wrap all of this up again, the London meetup is August 5th, just a few days away as we record. And then the meetup at JPL will be September 29th. And there's a series of meetups before that and after that. All of that's at meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. And the JPL tour lottery is at linuxunplugged.com slash JPL. We also, of course, have links in the show notes. All right, so let's talk about this turning point that I think Linux could be at.

And it's, again, I don't think we're rushing into it at a breakneck pace. I don't think everything's going to change overnight. But I would be willing to go on the record, which I'm about to do right now, the nature of the show. I'd say in 10 years, we're going to be in a much different space. And this stuff's going to be a lot more ironed out, perhaps a lot more standard. You're seeing it already. I'm talking about the two kinds of Linux that are out there now.

There's the old school kind that lets you do anything you want. These are your Ubuntu desktops, your Linux Mint desktop, your Mangeros. You just, you know, all those types of desktops, you just have full access.

If you're a root user or whatever, you can do anything to the system. You can install anything anywhere. It's great for tinkers and we've made it work really great as a desktop and server operating system. That's sort of the traditional Linux. And now there's also, and they've been around for a while, like in the case of Nix, a decade, and there's many others. And Chrome OS is technically this type of Linux. Endless OS is technically this type of Linux. And Silverblue is this type of Linux. And these are your immutable Linuxes, the ones where they're

solidly reproducible and you can roll back if something goes wrong. If you do an update and it botches your favorite application, you roll back. If you think of it more as like it's an operating system that rides almost on top of Git, only it's your file system, and it's being managed with check-ins and check-outs and that type of stuff. It's a completely different approach. And in these scenarios, as an end user, you sometimes don't get access to a typical package manager. You're not supposed to write to that directory. You know, you maybe can't do anything outside your home directory at all. And if you want to add an application, you're really only supposed to do it through Flatpak.

directory at all. And if you want to add an application, you're really only supposed to do it through Flatpak. That type of scenario where you can't just go in there and tweak something, or if you want to have 32-bit libraries, you don't just app get install the 32-bit library packages. It's a much more intentional where you have to really think about the modifications and changes you're going to make. But the end result is the system's a rock. You turn it on, as long as your hardware is functional, you know your Linux operating system is functional. It kind of is more like an appliance. And I think that's why you've seen this type of operating system design

really just take over mobile and appliance devices completely. This is pretty much how all mobile devices are done is this sort of design. It's how iOS works. It's how Android works. And now we're getting to the point where we've taken lessons from containers. We've really kind of looked at all the different options out there. We know about Git. We know about these tools. Now, how would you build a desktop around this? And could you make a workstation OS out of it? Could we use it? Could we use it as a studio OS? Could it work on a laptop that you want to game? Could it be great for Brent's HP Dev1? Would it work for years? These are the kind of questions that we had going into trying something like Fedora Silverblue. And Silverblue really felt like a great chance for us to try one of the distributions that's the furthest out ahead in this area for the desktop experience.

desktop experience. The idea being that you deploy this kind of system and then you're always going to get the desktop you expect. You got a problem, you roll it back. There are much more modern, much more advanced, much more capable package manager system that makes things like apt look really old. In fact, George Castro has a great tweet where he went and did the math on this one. And this is so like, like i don't know it's kind of not surprising to me but i think list the listeners are gonna are gonna probably think that i've never had a problem but he says i went and ran a query on 11 years over at i think it was stack exchange or something like that sorted then by view count looked counted up all the problems users ran into, and then looked at the top 200, and they all basically sort out to essentially be package manager-related issues

or installing software on Linux. I'll have a link in the show notes. There's a spreadsheet that he put out. And when you look at the top problems that people have been asking questions about and trying to fix on Linux, it's dominated by package manager problems.

Package manager is breaking, package is not installing, not knowing how to, somebody's trying to install a tar file. I don't want to hit this point too hard, but I think all of us on the show have felt like these things are starting to show their age, especially apt. And I don't mean, I love apt, but. Yeah, right. I mean, it doesn't, it hasn't seen that much love. We've kind of got the new, right? We've got the new front end bits, the apt stuff, which is nice.

I appreciate it. It's, you know, but mostly targeted at us humans and then didn't seem like it really fixed up much of the underlying plumbing per se. It feels so slow, too, compared to some of these newer tools. But that's an aside. It does make me think, too, when you're talking about just, you know, George's tweet there. It does make me think, too, when you're talking about just, you know, George's tweet there, it's almost as if, at least for how computing has evolved and, like, who's using computers, how computers have spread. If you think about, like, just how that's changed since some of these package managers were first introduced, maybe it's the wrong abstraction too high. You know, it might work well for us because we are okay with all the nitty-gritty of putting our system together that way, but not usually what most other folks want to be doing. I agree. I have thought for a while, it seems like these systems that we have today, especially the Debian based

systems and the Red Hat based systems were built for system administrators who are managing the software. They might not even have an internet internet connection maybe they only have a LAN and they have local packages on their LAN and they are managing all of it where Silverblue and Nix feel like it's more of a centrally managed idea you deploy it and then you just redeploy and redeploy and redeploy I think the end result sort of speaks for itself in terms of reliability but let's talk about actually using Silverblue for a little bit. I think, you know, that's the idea of why we wanted to try this. First of all, Silverblue lives and dies on its Flathub access. Like you really are going to be installing everything as a Flatpak for the most part. You can do RPM OS tree and you can install packages as a layer into your

Silverblue system, but ideally you want to use Flatpaks. And so that means Flathub. And the problem is, and I believe they're going to fix this in 37, but currently as it ships in 36, Flathub and Fedora is filtered. So guess what? Chrome doesn't show up. And some of the things that I wanted just weren't even available. And that is frustrating when this is supposed to be how I get access to software. And it felt Apple-like. You know, like how Apple would control the App Store experience and lock it down so that way I don't get the wrong thing or something like that. And that's not what I want for my workstation OS. So I'm glad to see that's on the list of things to fix.

I think it might be more like 38 now if what I remember last hearing. But yeah, right, it's going to get fixed. And it's not a huge deal for us because you just run, you know, whatever, Enable FlatHub and then you're off to the races for the most part, right? But if you're thinking about a system

that's getting shipped, ideally in a state that you're not going to be doing that much configuration on, customization on besides just this sort of, you know, oh, I need these things right now. That's not great. Once I did enable the rest of Flathub, which, you know, like you said, takes 30 seconds, the instructions are super easy to find on the Flathub website. True.

Yeah, that part. It's well documented at this point, which is nice. I could see this if you wanted to, if you liked this idea of an immutable Linux that has snapshots that is very intentionally controlled. I think like it'd be great for studio production. I think it'd be great for a work environment. I think it'd be great for like a terminal server environment. It's funny, though, in a lot of ways, and I'm curious to know if you guys felt this way. Silver blue would be a lot easier if it was the Linux you started with. If this was just your first experience with Linux, it would make sense because this is honestly how Mac OS works now.

Mac OS is a read only file system now. And when you say like drag and drop an application into the application folder, that's an overlay. That's not actually writing to the application folder. That's a read-only directory. And then your home directory is the only place that's actually read-writable, and then they have an overlay area. And so if you're used to these concepts, and you sat down and you use this as your first Linux, this wouldn't seem strange to you. This would seem totally fine. The only downside I would definitely absolutely know you'd run into is all the guides online for everything. I assume that you have

access to your full system and there's very little silver blue specific documentation. I suppose that is the benefit. It just makes me think of, you know, canonical folks rightfully complaining of like, yeah, your upgrade didn't go well because you followed half a dozen guides that made you make random changes to your system that you didn't understand. So, you know, you're right. There's not a lot of help for you, but perhaps it prevents some from making a mistake. I guess that's got to be part of the rationale here. Things are great when they're packaged. If there's an RPMOS tree you can install, or if there's a flat pack you can install, things are great. When they're not available like that, you resort pretty quickly

to just running binaries out of your home directory. And my beloved Tailscale was like this. Tailscale, which I have baked into every Nix I deploy, is got Tailscale. That was like one of the first things you figured out. Totally was. And with Silverblue, I mean, I patched it together. I got it working. I downloaded the Tailscale binaries, which they do make as a tarball that you can just go get.

And I deployed that onto like a bin folder. And then they have a little service you start, and then they have a little user space daemon you can run. And then I went and got the GNOME extension that connects to all of that. So I can actually manage it pretty well. It's basic, you know, it's not integrated. And I don't know if it's actually super straightforward or not to create a new system b unit file on silver blue and add a new service because i couldn't figure out how to make it work and so i just ended up running it manually everything like that like little edge case softwares are just a little bit harder on silver blue but if there's a package if there's a flat pack for it the experience is so smooth you wouldn't even know what's going on and by the

end of my experience, I had absolutely everything running. I had to have flat seal installed because like things like element needed some additional privileges or else it would crash. But flat seal makes it so easy to modify the permissions for flat packs. Got all your flat pack apps listed there, all of their capabilities, you know, and you can just check on, check off. And it really feels like a solid system. capabilities you know and you can just check on check off and it really feels like a solid system and i got old dos games going i got i got a whole bunch of old retro dos games i mean just tons of stuff working wine was working i have steam working i got several steam games downloaded installed on that thing and then i was also like once i got going i also started having a lot of

fun with things like toolbox of course you know, we've talked about Toolbox before. Oh, yeah. And this is just such a cool little idea. It's kind of become even bigger than the last time I used it. But Toolbox lets you quickly spin up, by default, a Fedora 36 environment that you can work in inside a terminal. And then you've got DNF. You've got everything. You can install whatever you want inside this environment.

And it really cleverly mounts your home directory. And so it's all really, it looks like you're on your local box, but you're running inside a container OS environment. And you can actually deploy Ubuntu and Arch and there's all kinds of SUSEs packaged up for this thing because they're just, they're just containers. Yeah, it's using all that great technology, the Podband type stuff that we've got the've got the bones of right and toolbox can all just kind of put it together into a nice little experience and uh there's a couple of uh like i think it's like boxy boxes there's something i can't remember in the in the software that you can install that's a terminal that's just dedicated for this so i open up my terminal and i'm in a special environment and i will link to distro box in the show notes which lets which is a tool that lets you do this on any distro. So you don't have to be on Silverblue or you don't have to be on Fedora. You can be on any distro and install DistroBox and then get to run these different containers, kind of like WSL, where you can have

a bunch of different distros in a window. So that's a DistroBox link in the show notes. You start doing stuff like that with Silverblue and then you know you're on this super solid base. I started to really get into it towards the end. It took me a while to get over the fact that it's not Nix and that it's definitely very desktop focused and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, man, like I don't know if it could fully replace all my systems,

but I put it on the dev one and everything worked. And that's a big part of it. It's a whole open source graphics stack. It's everything worked. It that's a big part of it. It's a whole open source graphics stack. It's everything worked. It is a very solid experience. So my intention is to keep it on there for as long as I can and see if I can go through an upgrade cycle and see what that's like. Because I think I want to keep it as my daily driver. I really liked it.

And I think now it's let's keep going with this for a little bit longer and see if, you know, maybe this is my workstation OS for the studio, too. We'll see. But in the end, it's a keeper, I think. And I could see the appeal to Kino Knight if you want the Plasma version. I think it's a little bit on the fringe. You're already, you know, when you're using Fedora, you're already kind of like a little bit harder to find stuff, just a little bit harder to find guides and maybe a little bit harder to find software. It's all getting so much better. And then you take on Silverblue and it gets just like even a little bit harder than that.

So I don't think this is for average folks that just, you know, don't want a system they have to mess with, even though ironically that's the goal of this thing. I just don't know if it's user manageable yet, but I think ultimately it will be. Well, and I think you hit it on the, you know, live or die with flat pack thing. I think it depends on what user you're talking about. Maybe LUP listeners, no. But like my mom, maybe yeah, because I don't want her downloading random RPMs

or dev from the internet and installing them, right? I want her to get the software from the store and know that it comes hopefully, you know, as a nice little flat pack and that kind of thing. I keep having this feeling with Silverblue where the admin side of me, and I hear you struggling with some things and not being able to put more in a box

or messing things up in your toolbox and not on the system. I'm like, yeah, I like that. Don't let Chris touch stuff under slash user, right? But then I want to touch those things. So I'm a little conflicted on like, I can, I would want to deploy this elsewhere. I don't know how much yet I want to deploy it for myself. Yeah, I think that's probably a lot of people are going to feel when you use it. It's like, okay, this makes sense. On a machine that's on the factory floor. This makes sense, maybe on

a dedicated live stream machine, or this makes sense on a work station that's in an office where you have a bunch of people who are just doing input work into like standard OfficeSuite applications. I think it makes tons of sense in all those scenarios. But if you know how to use Linux and you like to tinker with things, install things and all that, I just don't know. I just don't know. But I guess we'll find out what you guys thought in just a moment. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on your new account. And of course, it's a great way to support the show while getting yourself a little something special. Linode is really the Linux geeks cloud. 11 data centers worldwide means there's something close to you, a customer, a client, or your friends.

They've been doing this for nearly 19 years, so they have honed this thing in. They have polished this thing until it shines. So go try something. Go deploy something. Go take advantage of that $100 and see why we run everything on Linode. Stuff for our team, stuff for ourselves, and stuff that is audience-facing. Linode is always rolling out screaming fast new hardware like NVMe drives, dedicated AMD EPYC CPUs. You know, if you need to do a little audio and video transcoding in the cloud like

we do, a dedicated CPU can make a big difference. Maybe you just want to run a game server. Again, a dedicated CPU can make a big difference. And I hear from audience members who offload their machine learning to Linode's cloud. How neat is that? And I'm always super impressed by those of you who tell me how you use Kubernetes or Ansible or Terraform to manage your Ansible systems. And of course, you know, I love their API.

That makes it super quick and clean to get things spun up, to reboot a server, to take a snapshot before we do something crazy. I'll even put the command line tool on my Linode box so that way I can initiate a snapshot from the interface when I'm logged in, like on, you know, the shell, and get a snapshot on the Node side before I do anything crazy. You know, when I remember. But the tools are there. And then the other thing that's really great is we've taken advantage of their object storage, their DDoS protection, their cloud firewalls. I mean, you can really stack and mix and match as you like. And the

best part is everything is really reasonably priced, 30 to 50% cheaper than the major hyperscalers out there. And they're not like these crazy esoteric, unique options that are only really viable on one hyperscalers platform and they use their own language and everything. It's not like that at all with Linode. These are standards. It's Linux. It's open source projects. These one click deployments, you can go look how they put them together. It all makes sense. It's all reproducible. It's so clean. It's just the best place to run apps on Linux in the cloud. That's why they're giving you a hundred bucks to try it because they think if you really do try it, you're going to like it. A hundred bucks, that's confidence right there. So go try it.

Support the show. Learn yourself something. Try something. Experience something. Linode.com slash unplugged. I think you're really going to like it. One more time, it's Linode.com slash unplugged. You know, guys, I went a little crazy this week.

I met Alex's, and he's got all these toys. So I figured I'm going to put silver blue everywhere. So I got three projects for you. The first one I did. So I didn't do as deep a dive, Chris, as you did. So I appreciate your perspective on it. But I did, however, sort of touch silver blue in a bunch of different areas. So the first one I did was just in a VM on this neon box that I have here using, and it went perfectly fine. I did watch a video quickly

just to get a sense of silver blue. And I think Chris, that what you mentioned before the break was spot on just explaining sort of how it works and wrapping your head around how it's a different paradigm. If you don't do that, you're going to be really lost trying to use this. But it seemed fairly straightforward. The install process was super smooth. I really appreciated how easy all of that was. I did run into a small error in the software center that I'm sure they're aware of. Maybe we should check, Chris.

I think you ran into this as well. I'm sure they're aware of. Maybe we should check, Chris. I think you ran into this as well. The software center is doing the background updates for you on the system, but the user experience is a little odd because it sort of does the downloads for the entire new image of Silverblue when you first launch it. But the message it gives you is like what you would expect if you're just updating like the package index. And so it takes like, you know, I'm here with this amazing internet connection. It took like a full two minutes and I think you had to wait quite a while as well, right? Yeah. And of course the first thing like you do within a minute or two, once you got a fresh install is you launch software because it's time to load some apps in

there. And yeah, I got a really wild air message. It was a little bit different than the message you got. I think it was exactly the same kind of thing, though. Basically, it was still refreshing all of its metadata in the background. It wasn't really that obvious. There may have been a spinner up in the left corner. Well, I did some investigating because I thought, this is what's going on here. I got to know more. And I figure if I was home, I would have just abandoned because had I been doing a bunch of downloads, which took two minutes here with like one of the best internet connections I've ever used, I think at home, it probably would have taken me like an hour or two or something.

So I'm glad I wasn't trying it back there. So I did some investigating and sort of because I was trying this in a VM, I could just wipe the system and try it again pretty darn easily. Ha ha ha. Done with you. Right. So I thought, I'm going to start again and do some poking around. So I was able to discern that it downloads the whole fresh new image when you first launch Software Center. whole fresh new image when you first launch software center. And that actually is great because then you're, you know, you go to update and it just says, oh, you're ready to go. Just reboot. So I think the wording, they could change it quickly to something more useful,

but that was actually a nice experience, you know? Exactly. Once it's done, it's a great experience. Yeah. Yeah. And then, uh, so as we do, I then thought, well, geez, I want to know how all this is working and get some more visuals. So the RPM OS tree terminal command was actually super friendly, like just with the status. I don't know if you did some investigating. Yes. So RPM OS tree status just gives you like the various versions that are installed. And it even gives you some of those layered packages that you may have installed that you mentioned that you install with rpm ostree install now that is a discouraged way to install software it's like an as an as needed way to do it but one of the examples they

gave in their wonderful documentation was fish and west turned me on to fish recently and i've been really enjoying it and i was like oh they're basically saying that they want me to try this right you see how i got the credit for fish even though you've been talking about it for years yeah that's great next thing he's gonna tell you i tried this new text editor called nano and i think it's pretty nice and elegant and so installing fish via the rpmos tree was uh very interesting because it did things that you would never see with apt, you know, apt to chose you a few packages you need, and then you install it and you could go. But this did like all sorts of crazy stuff.

I suggest everybody goes and tries it. It's like, I don't know what it's doing under the hood, but it was a fascinating experience. And then it totally worked. It was great. So, but you have to reboot to make that sort of, sort of, it's kind of Nixie in that way. You have to reboot to make it apply, which can be frustrating. There is a live flag that I think became standard in 36. I don't know, the reboot thing, it's not really a big deal. See, it bothers me a lot. Oh, does it?

I just don't reboot very often. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with Wes. But I think if you want the benefits, then that's a necessity because of the way it's engineered. I'm not that worried about restarting service. I'm not worried about the race. I get those for some systems for sure, especially in remote managed systems. But really, I'm not running that many services on my desktop. And then if something does go wrong, that's when I'm happy to reboot. But like, I just I just, unless it's a kernel update, I

really don't reboot that often. So, I get that, I get it, I'm not opposed to it, but that was one of the things that took me the longest to adjust. I just, you know what, I just decided I'm going to embrace the reboot lifestyle because the damn thing boots fast. It does really, it boots really fast. So I was like, fine. But yeah, you're right. That

is the thing you got to perciate and understand is you're switching over to a live image, right? You're switching over to that, to that branch now. So you're booting into that environment that has that version of the packages and whatnot. And the great thing is you can go back, but the kind of trade-off that they have there is to switch over, you're doing a reboot. Yeah. I think if you've joined us on the next challenge, that will not feel out of place. I think that's kind of necessary for this kind of paradigm shift. But it would be interesting, though, touching on next to see some like declarative configuration to avoid maybe as many reboots. Chris, I don't know, you set up all these crazy things. I don't know how many applications you installed flat pack versus this layered packaging and how many reboots you did

i did very few layered packages just because to me it felt i don't know like it felt like the right way to go was flat packs and with flat packs is i go to flat hub and i just open up like all of them that i want i just sit there and i just tap tap, like, all of them that I want. I just sit there, and I just tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab. And then I go, and I copy pasta all of, like, the names, because they have the little install command below, God bless. And I just copy that, and I just paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, and then enter, and then it just installs all of them at once, and it's glorious. And with the Flatpaks, you don't have to reboot or anything. So I hit enter, and it's glorious and with the flat with the flat packs you don't have to reboot or anything so i hit enter and it's done and what's so nice now in modern versions of gnome and and

everything is everything's available right away the launchers are available in the search it's indexed so it's as soon as the app's installed you can use it and so i went that way for a lot of things but there's things on the command line there's just system tools like i installed cockpit via rpm ostree and just to play around and fish and those kinds of things i install via rpm ostree and so you know when i say when i do an rpm ostree status i do have several layers listed there now and feels gross but i get i get by i found it really nice to have the option because you know when there's there are things that you just can't find in the FlackPack offering. For some reason, NeoFetch wasn't in there maybe because it has to touch a bunch of crazy things. It's nice to have that option for those of us who want to dig in a little deeper.

You know what I was surprised by? Perhaps this will make sense in a moment, but I was surprised that in Nix, I have a much harder time getting GNOME extensions working. And in Silverblue, I just go to the extensions website and I just install the extensions. Let's pause right here before we get to the Raspberry Pi journey that Brent went on, because I do want to hear about that. And let's let Neil jump in and just kind of touch on some things that we've mentioned. Because I know, Neil, you've got thoughts on who these types of systems are targeted for. And there's probably some other things we've mentioned that you want to touch on. My feeling about Silver, Blue, and Kinoite and similar systems like this is that they tend to hit opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of users.

So you're either going to have really simple users who don't really demand much from their systems who want to use this. I know someone throughout, grandma or whatever, right? That's one side of it. But the other side of it is the people who, what I like to call, live in the container circus. And they are super enthusiastic about the containerization of the world. And they're willing to take all the downsides of operating in that world because they consider it the best method to deal with it.

So they consider, you know, in some respects, maybe the downsides are upsides for them and things of that nature. But there's a lot of Linux users in the middle where this is probably not going to work super well because, you know, things like NeoFetch and Phish and whatever, the nature of those things, they're not easy to containerize, especially if you actually want to plug them into your system and use them as part of the system. Yes, RPMOS tree lets you layer them, but somewhat disingenuously, there is no straightforward method for you to know whether you're layering or not. And in the graphical environment, you can't really see any of those things or work with it.

And it's pretty much command line only. And that's obviously a barrier for a large swath of users. And that's obviously a barrier for a large swath of users. So where I see, aside from OS tree, then things start fitting a little bit better because then you can use it as an idea of like in a corporate environment, maybe you have office workers and you need to make sure that they have XYZ software on all these machines. And you want to make sure the configuration, the deployment is standardized and you want to be able to easily lock it down so that they can't do anything else.

and you want to be able to easily lock it down so that they can't do anything else. Well, then you can produce your own OS tree using the RPMOS tree composing the CoreOS composition, CoreOS assembler, which I think is the tool that's used for this, and some other RPMOS tree tooling, image creation processes, whatever, to create these OS trees to then feed into like Anaconda to pull them and mass deploy them to hundreds of systems. And then they're chained to that and they update with that based on what, you know, the IT team wants. This is essentially the holy grail for managed computers in a

corporate environment because they don't need to worry about things like, oh, do we need GPOs or whatever? Do we need, you know, insert XYZ remote machine, you know, configuration tool or whatever, because they basically statically define it server side. The biggest downside to RPMOS tree-based systems or really a lot of these quote-unquote immutable desktop platforms is that somebody else had to make the decisions for you unless you were able to build it yourself assemble it yourself uh and so keeping that caveat in mind i think it starts to make a lot more sense where you're going to likely see these become popular. I can see that.

I think that's where you're going to see more of it. And like my personal feeling is like, maybe we'll see it for like example, Fedora mobile. I know that's definitely one example where we're probably going to see our PMO history become more of a thing. I know that's, you know,

in the Katie SIG, we're thinking about it for the Fedora mobile Katie, uh, Maybe some other places will do it. But like, for the regular desktop for most users, it gets a little awkward, and it requires a lot of extra overhead. And there hasn't been a ton of thought into how to make the developer experience for, not just the developer experience, but the user experience seamless for dealing with this. So for example, Steam as a flat pack has a major downside in that you can't use an external data drive. I don't know about you,

but I'm not putting all of my Steam downloads and running my Steam games from my home directory because it's going to fill it up immensely. Things like that are really difficult to deal with with the way things are right now. Could be solvable, that kind of thing though, right? Right, it could be. The biggest problem is that everyone's thinking of solving this

by modifying the applications. Like in both Windows and Mac, the way that they're containerizing applications involves the applications not changing and that the OS layer or the toolkit layers are changing to account for this instead. But nobody's thinking of making these applications work just out of the gate.

And because they're making the changes at the application level, because GNOME wants to change all of GNOME for GNOME's reasons, or K Gnome wants to change all of Gnome for Gnome's reasons, or KDE Plasma wants to change its applications to adapt for these whatevers, it's leaving out that other class of applications where you can't change anything. And so you need some level of indirection below the application to do it meaningfully. Or they're never going to change just because the market share doesn't really...

The market share doesn't matter, right? So take, for example, all the portal stuff, right? Do you know the only portal that actually works without application modification is the FilePicker one? That's the only one. Because that portal implementation is done at the toolkit layer, at GTK or Qt. But if your application doesn't use either of those,

you're out of luck. You can't flat pack it. Those are the kinds of problems that are just not being solved. I look at like where, so Endless, I look at where they're going. And I think if you take that out on a timeline that's like 10 years,

maybe they start chipping away at some of these usability problems. And then you get to the situation where your mint-type Linux distros, your endless-type Linux distros, are sort of almost just by like steak and potatoes, like all of them are OS tree-based or some kind of system like that. But then the systems that sysadmins and maybe developers and people that consider themselves enthusiasts and power users,

those are still... Traditional. Absolutely. Yeah. That is where I actually see this going. I see this going in a realm of, if you're in a corporate environment and you're rolling out things to people with minimal training, then immutable... I hate immutable as a term for this because that's not a correct way to describe it, but we're going to go with it. These immutable, I hate immutable as a term for this, because that's not a correct way to describe it. But we're going to go with it. These immutable desktop platforms are very, very good choices. But once you start getting into people that need to like do things like at a level that kind of exceeds what this is able to handle, it gets difficult. And this is where I think, Chris, you ran into way more

problems because you're sitting on the edge of this a lot and you're hitting those boundaries very often. And I think that for your simpler use, like for example, most people are probably going to be treating it similar to a Chromebook. A Chromebook-style model is totally going to work great with Silver, Blue, or Kinoite because the vast majority of these things are just not going to need to be layered in. But as soon as you start getting into having to manage external capabilities, system extensions, drivers, it starts falling apart unless somebody builds a custom image up front. And that's where you start getting into where corporate environments it starts falling apart unless somebody builds a custom image up front.

And that's where you start getting into where corporate environments are probably going to want this. They'll bake in firmware, they'll bake in drivers, they'll bake in all these other things. And so that's where I feel like some of this is a solution looking for a problem, but some of this is also where it's trying to solve a problem that most people don't need to have solved. I think most enthusiasts, right? The people who are really going out and downloading Linux ISOs, they don't have this problem. Right. It is absolutely necessary for growing the total addressable market of Linux users because you're targeting a different class of them. And so I can always see, like, for example, Civil Air Blue and Kinoite being alongside the main workstation and KDE variants. And personally speaking, as someone working in the KDE SIG, this is how I position the two. I position them for

different types of people. And when Kinoite gets, you know, more up to scratch, there's still things we've got to do, things we've got to beef up, integration work that needs to be completed. You know, once we're there, I see Kinoite as the one for the simple user or the managed user. Right. And then you get that plasma, baby. That's great. Right. And then the rest of it is, you know, whatever. Okay. So that's kind of where I'm seeing this, is I'm really seeing like two types of Linuxes really out there, two types of Linux desktops. But Brent, I wanted to switch back to the Raspberry Pi for a moment because I often treat my Pis like an appliance. I've definitely played around with on and off over the last year with my Pi 400, creating like these different kind of

always ready to go workstations, like the idea, oh crap, I forgot my laptop, but I've got this Raspberry Pi 400, which is the Pi built into the keyboard. I've got that all hooked up and ready to go. What's the perfect OS for that? And Silverblue I've thought of, right now I have PopOS on there.

I've been trying their Raspberry Pi build, but I'm curious how your efforts went and if you've managed to actually get Silverblue working on a Pi 4. These are all important questions, you know, before even starting this project, because there's, you know, been a Pi behind me for a few weeks now, weeks, I don't know. I paused because I was like, no, no, Chris is going to try this, right? I'm just duplicating efforts here. And then I thought, well, I'm just going to give it a go anyways. And so I'm surprised to hear, Chris, that you may not have tried it. I did have to do a little bit of tinkering. Now I'm not that Pi initiated. So I did a little bit of tinkering to get the ISO to boot.

So I do have some resources here. I had to download and very simply put on the SD card, a Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI firmware image that would, I guess, see a USB drive and be able to boot from that. Once I did that, that was like a little tip that I found once I did that. Super easy. My preferred end case was to install from a USB drive to another USB drive, and I was never able to get that to work. This morning, I had a little bit of a light bulb moment, and I just installed it to the SD card because I'm not running this thing for a long time, but I able to get that to work. This morning, I had a little bit of a light bulb moment. And I just installed it to the SD card. Because I'm not running this thing for a long time. But I wanted to get it going.

And I thought, oh, I think there's a way that I can make this happen. So what I ended up doing was just leaving a small partition for that UEFI stuff. And then I was able to get the installer up and running. And get Silverblue installed alongside this partition that I had made. And so it's booted right now behind me. It's doing stuff. And it is running without complaining any. It is very slow for a variety of reasons.

You know, this could be a hardware issue, clearly. SD card is very slow. Yeah, right. So I don't have that much experience to say, well, how slow is it compared to maybe the optimum setup? I would say as a desktop, at least the way I have it set up, it is unusable. Yeah, it's just too slow. Well, if I want to move the mouse, I got to move the mouse, wait for a sec or three, and then the mouse begins to move and then I could do stuff. That sounds like a video acceleration issue, Rod Becker. I'm sure there's work that can be done here to greatly improve this experience.

I was going to say, Brent doesn't have outrageous standards here, so his unusable is... Can I just say, that's true, you're right. Actually, we should appreciate that comment. I was getting frustrated, but you're right. Not in a bad way, but Brent can use a lot of different systems. He's not super picky about the you know, that the performance side of things usually. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's a very nice way to say it. That's the nice. I don't need to elaborate. I think everybody understands what you're saying. OK, now, can I just say like, I, Brentley, I wanted, I wanted to, I wanted to have this really, you know, gentle and wholesome and great Raspberry Pi experience with you, right? I wanted to have you sit down with a Raspberry Pi that had a USB SSD for its storage and it had a camera device attached to it. And then I wanted to experiment with a compute module that had eMMC built in with a carrier board.

And instead, I feel like you've had the most, well, perhaps appropriate introduction to Raspberry Pi as possible, I suppose. You will be able to appreciate how far they've come next time you're at the studio and we mess around with some of the Studio Pi setups. Because, yeah, it's, oh, there's really, the peak Pi experience is the compute module on a carrier board

with eMMC storage, because what happens, and it's beautiful, is when you boot from an iso image you just have to get any old generic arm iso image now it's so wonderful you know you boot from an iso image and it sees the emmc storage as a local disk like it like just like a dev sda type disk. And then you just install Linux on it like it's a computer. And then when you're done, you disconnect the USB and you reboot and it boots up off its local disk like a real computer. And it's so much better than what you're having to go through. So that seems so luxurious.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, just so you know. But it's hard for me. I wanted your first Pi experiences to be better than this. But I feel like perhaps if you stick with it, you actually appreciates more where it's hard for me i wanted your first pi experiences to be better than this but i feel like perhaps if you stick with it you actually appreciates more where it's gotten to once you get to use different setups so yeah don't judge the whole system while bottlenecked i do also appreciate the tinkering aspect so there's something about you know staying up maybe a little too late and solving some problems that uh are lessons you know don't forget. And so I've appreciated that. But I think

it sounds to me like what you're suggesting is I'm living in like Pi World from three years ago and not the updated experience. So I'm looking forward to the upgrade. Yeah. I mean, it is what you make it. You could put different stuff together. I'm sure from, I mean, I'm sure Alex has drawers full of stuff, but yeah. Oh yeah. He's got a bunch of things like that were connected to it, but I haven't given myself the leeway to erase any of his data because I feel like that would maybe challenge our friendship. It's not erasing if you back it up and restore it afterwards.

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Well, I came into my silver blue journey, having had a kind of persistent Fedora 36 install hanging around. I don't use it for everything, you know, but it's something I consistently like, especially for just hanging out the nice modern linux desktop on the couch while i'm catching up on things or you know doing some show prep or the like on one hand i was kind of really impressed with silver blue because it did not feel that different from the you know just the standard fedora 36 install i mean there's some differences here and there if you you know unless you start looking under the hood but just from a surface level user you know i wiped that old

one away because i just i just like well sorry fedora 36 uh your partition is getting sacrificed here sure right um and switch it over to silver blue and sure you know set up a few things to get back to where i was but on that surface level i mean i wouldn't have known if it wasn't my laptop and i did start poking under the covers yeah if you just sat down at a machine, I don't know if you could tell. Yeah, exactly. To get there, though, I had a little more struggles than I was expecting, honestly. I mean,

okay, at first I tried Ventoy just because I wanted an excuse to, like, I hadn't updated my USB for a while. I'd been using that same USB when I was doing the NixPi experiment stuff, because it's the fastest USB that I had laying around. So I was like, okay, wipe it out, get the fresh Ventoy, stick Silverblue on there, my first ISO on the new Ventoy,

get it booted up real great. Also, they've got the GUI version to install Ventoy, they've got the script, they've got the web client, and they've now got that web configurator to configure the like plugins and the config for the plugins and stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's real slick.

Anyway, that worked fine. Boot it up. I'm installing. The following error occurred while installing the payload. This is a fatal error and installation will be aborted. Oh, this is in the installer. Yeah. OS tree admin and then it specifies

the sysroot deploy. So it's trying to do that deploy of the like, you know, the base silver blue image exited with the code one. That was a little bit disappointing. I thought, you know,

I always do things a little bit weird. So in this case, I'm trying to install to a partition, but I deleted things. I gave it some free space. I let it automatically

use the free space and like come up with how it wanted to use that. Should be fine. So it seemed like it should be fine. So then I go and I get the Fedora image writer and I write the image that way to the USB, blow away my new Ventoy install just to be like, okay, well. Doing it by the book. Doing it by the

book this time. Same thing. So that was like a little off-putting. Yeah, I bet. I don't know what was going on. Normally this is where I've installed Silverblue multiple times in the past and it was fine. Ultimately I just ended up installing, doing the thing where I install it via a virtual machine and then

reboot it that way. And then it worked fine. So you used Kexec. Yeah. A little Kexec. Of course you did. We need a little jingle for that one. We do. Someone make us a Kexec jingle. This time it didn't break things. It actually made things work better. Oh, yeah, that's true.

So, hey, I feel a little bit vindicated. Perhaps more appropriate for the scope of this type of distribution. Really, let's be honest. So, okay. Once you got in there. I did run into, unlike regular Fedora, K-Exec wasn't built into the base image. And then that's where I had to start learning a little bit about, how do I get this binary

live right now? Because I don't want a reboot. I want a KExec right now. Of course. Alright. I love the KExec. It always inevitably ends up your solution. Somehow Brent and I would have solved that problem and I don't think KExec would have

been involved at all. I don't know, they've never even installed it somehow. Anyways, what was your impression once you got it up and going? It didn't feel like my system. You know, when I was first exploring NixOS for better or worse, you kind of had to learn the build

side of it, at least a little bit, right? Because you're going to be using the Nix language to configure your system and then you're probably going to start looking at the next packages stuff to go see like what's in there and then you probably start reading the like the expressions for how they're built to see like oh is this the thing that i want and it's getting the thing the pieces that i need and so in that way yeah whether you're forced maybe but you're also sort of welcome just maybe too strong of a word, but you know, like you have to learn that. And then that means you're configuring it and customizing it.

And Silverblue felt much more like it was someone else that had constructed this system for me. And I was just kind of a guest on it. Wow. You really just touched on something that I hadn't even put words to or thought about, but it is an exact 180 experience. Silverblue feels like it's been composed by a team and you're using it, and a NixOS install feels like you handcrafted this thing and it is exactly your thing that you have built, much like a custom Arch or Gentoo install does. Right, just easier. Yeah,

it's a total different experience when you're still trying to get to the same result. That's fascinating. Now, admittedly, I would like to spend some more time playing with OSTree and RPM OSTree. I mean, I think the technology underlying it is really quite neat, right? I mean, you kind of

hit on it, it's like a version control system. It's like Git, but for binary files to build operating systems with. And it shares with Nix this idea of different roots of your system that you can build separately, right? So you can have all these, you can have this big old store

of all the underlying files and then compose those together in different ways and sort of manipulate it and create new versions without having to duplicate your whole system or back up everything onto our sync like we did in the old days. So I like that. I wasn't forced to, and so I haven't yet had the opportunity to dive in

and figure out, like, well, how can I make OSTree work a little bit better for me? Or what if I want to start trying to build, like, my own take on the image and build my own image I was going to pre-configure for Raspberry Pis that we deployed in the studio or for some studio rigs. In the same the same sense I'd probably want to you know get a little better at maybe making RPMs I've done that in the past or really and I probably need to do this anyways get a little better at configuring with Flatpak right I kind of accepted on the Nix side that well I'm probably going to end up writing some Nix expressions I might end up packaging something even if it's just something I package for myself locally

or figure out how to build and extract from a tarball and stuff. And I feel like if I was going to use it on a machine that I was actively, not tinkering, but like, you know, doing Linux stuff with, I'd probably want to embrace those tools a little bit more to, you know, learn how I could customize it. Yeah, and something else that strikes me about what you're saying too is with the Nix system, when you've built it, for the most part, all of those packages are locally installed.

They have access to the local file system. They're not sandboxed. You can absolutely use Flatpaks on a Nix desktop, but like my base NixOS setup, a lot of the standard things I use are just installed via my Nix config, and they're all local applications that have access to the full system, like VS Code, which is how I prefer to run VS Code. Now, I'm using it as a flat pack, and I can make that work, but I prefer to just have access to my entire file system. Yeah, there are some limitations with the flat pack in particular, and what kind of language runtimes do you need integrated, and how do you get that all to play nicely?

And yeah, you're right. I mean, Nix doesn't really have a traditional file system hierarchy, which causes its own set of problems, obviously. But I think that the self-hosted episode title was like, No Container Theory. That was it, right? In all the ways that Nix is more complicated, it's also simpler in that there's just,

because you have this control at the build system level, you don't necessarily do it at the operating system level with things like containers. Yeah. The flip side of this, though, is something, you know, Neil hit on in the managed environment or just, you know, with things like Chromebooks or it makes me think, too, of, you know, you were talking about

DistroBox. If I had a Windows machine, I wouldn't be configuring Windows or customizing it, or I would try to avoid doing that, right? I would be spinning up WSL instances and doing it that way. Yeah. If you're coming from the traditional OSs, this approach isn't that strange. And then, you know, these days you also have things like, you know, cloud developer environments.

You have things where, you know, it's very common to just, you know, you've got your ID, you've got your local thing, however that's set up. And then you've got your scratch box that's a, you know, instance on Amazon or whatever. So part of me also wonders if this is just a mentality shift I need to have, like, in the WSL version, you know, they've done a lot of work to make that pretty seamless, especially with all the graphical support that they've worked on too, right? So if there's more of that, like, you know, things to hook up toolbox more so into the native system, things like virtualization that did the same. Maybe that would, maybe that,

if I could embrace that workflow, that might make a lot of my problems go away. Yeah, and then there's those edge cases like Tailscale or like Reaper, where you'd love to see a solution that really makes that fit. So at the end of all of this, if you could only install one, like here in the studio or for your system,

on a desktop that you're going to use or like on a stream machine, would you do Nix OS right now or would you do Silverblue at this point? I think for me, and part of this is just maybe this cost fallacy, but I think I'd do Nix. I feel a little more comfortable there. I feel a little more familiar and I think I'm more aware of the various escape hatches and ways that we could make it work. It might end up being more of a time investment, but that's where I have the most confidence at the moment. I tend to lean towards Nix as well because Silverblue was a pretty good desktop experience, but Nix also is great on the server and I could see using it on the desktop.

And I like the idea of just using Nix. And then the other thing that's brilliant about it is even when I'm on a different distribution, I can still install the Nix package manager. So it's just like I invest in a skill set that I can really use in multiple different ways. So that's sort of why I lean towards Nix. Plus, I really, I like the idea, and Brent, you touched on this.

I like the idea of I just have a NixOS config and the system is built from that. Whereas with Silverblue, it's a system that's built and then I configure it and I install all my stuff into it. But with the Nix system, when I'm done and I start it up, everything I want is installed already. It's already good to go. So what about you, Brent? Where do you lean? Because there is the whole Red Hat ecosystem.

So there is benefit in learning this and just being in that Red Hat ecosystem, which, you know, is always great for anybody that's in the industry. It felt mostly like Fedora. Yeah. So there's lots of like about that. And you can apply a lot of the Fedora skill sets to this too. So I'm curious where you land on it, Brent. If you could only pick one in some weird, bizarro, you know,

like I said, the CEO of Linux calls you up and says, Brent, we're going to get rid of one of these. You got to pick. Which one would you pick? What would you tell the CEO of Linux? That person shouldn't ask me, I think, probably. I think you nailed it right there, Chris, of what I was thinking. And maybe we're not giving it enough justice, but that declarative nature is really attractive. And Neil touched on how you can use OSTree, if you know what you're doing, to kind of accomplish the same end goal, which is declaring what your system should look like and be able to reproduce those fairly easily.

That just seems very, very, very attractive in a, you know, I'm going to put a time investment into a system and then just reap the rewards forever from it. just reap the rewards forever from it. So I would lean NixWord because it feels, I don't know, like that documentation was presented fairly easily to, you know, that's the only way to use NixOS. So like Wes said, you kind of forced to jump in, but, and you get the benefits right away. So when I was reading the documentation on Silverblue, I didn't even come across any of that suggestion that that was a way that this could be done with this system. And maybe the documentation is or the version of the documentation I reached was meant for end users and not specifically for administrators. But maybe it or that info maybe is in the installer documentation or something like that. Right. Could be. But it leads me to wonder, well, maybe that's not what they're banking on then.

Or maybe it's not meant for someone like me who isn't a system administrator for hundreds of systems and just has maybe a handful that he wants to quote-unquote administrate. Maybe, but I'm on board with you. I'd like to know if the audience would be interested in us trying out Endless, because this is, I think, on the other spectrum here. Endless OS, GTK GNOME-based desktop, and the same thing, OS3 approach, but it's Debian-based, which is, I think, that's kind of interesting.

So let us know, send us a boost, or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And speaking of the contact page, I do just want to tidy up in here really briefly and mention your emails matter. We read them all the time, linuxunplugged.com slash contact for that. And I want to say thank you to our members. You guys, you give us the power to be picky and choosy.

You make it so that our audience is our largest customer. That is critical because it allows us to say no to all kinds of ridiculous things. And we've seen some really funny offers. I don't know what's going on out there, but we have seen some really funny offers come in for advertisers. And I suppose if we were hard up, you know, maybe you'd have to say, maybe we could try this. But our members. Yeah, members, if you have any sketchy links you want us to put on the episode, I mean, just let us know. Really, yeah. But you know what really

matters is a business. Our members are our largest customers, so we've got to make sure they're happy. And of course, we would always try to do that. But I think it makes sense to have both us as hosts aligned that way and JB as a business aligned that way. So, if you'd like to become a member, that's at unpluggedcore.com. Or if you want to support the entire network,

jupiter.party for that. If you want to send a boost into the show, go get a new podcast app and new podcast apps.com. As always, we got some amazing feedback this week. So thank you to everyone who wrote in and please feel free to write in about just about anything isaac wrote in about hp do you remember we were talking about hp we got a boost in talking about hp and the dev one and not being able to order it from an enterprise perspective yeah i hate the nuances of supplies yeah isaac uh gave us a little tidbit that might be helpful here in understanding that situation. They're right. In regards to HP Dev 1, HP split into two companies a few years ago.

HP and then HPE, the enterprise version. So the HP Dev 1 is a product that the consumer company, HP, and I would guess that the person complaining about the company not being able to order it is going through the business relationships with hpe despite both coming from one company and still using hp in their names the two companies are completely separate and would not recommend each other's products not confusing at all we knew this too but i this has got to be what it was um and that's why they're like we don't sell sell that. And of course, as a consumer, you're like, but your name's HP. It's an HP dev one. Yeah, that's silly. It's very silly.

Carson also wrote in with some Steam Deck hacks, Chris, which I think is probably up here, Ali. Hey, they're right. Hey, broke college student here. Big fan of the show. Heard your review of the Steam deck and just wanted to let you know about a project called Holo ISO. That is the official, unofficial SteamOS image taken directly from the Steam deck. I installed this on an old

deconstructed laptop board, similar to the one behind me, paired it with an Xbox handle and got a great home theater interface for streaming games from my pc it works flawlessly also if you want to know more about the graphical stack of the deck check out beam deck guide on github which explains how the game mode compositor uses x-wayland for frames you might be able to use this information to modify your installation virtual keyboard boot into plasma etc to suit your needs. This looks neat. I mean, it's kind of like a neat little guide.

I don't quite know what the intended audience is, but it seems like it could be really useful for folks who have gotten a Steam Deck or maybe Linux curious but are not listeners of this show already. I got a couple of good tips, including there's a command I can do to make the file system read-write so I can install stuffs. But of course, then when you do an update to the image,

it kind of undoes whatever you did. But I have to say, week two with the Steam Deck has been interesting. First few days of the week, I didn't even pick it up. I just did not even have an opportunity to play and then the weekend rolled around and i found myself with 20 minutes here 20 minutes there and i probably picked it up four or five times and played a steam game and i have to say this is i realized when i put the order in exactly what i was hoping for because living in a tiny home like i don't have always a machine actually set up.

I don't have, I currently don't have a desktop set up. I sometimes do. You don't have a dedicated room with your gaming rig and a chair and everything all ready to go. Yeah, no. And I don't even have a game console hooked up at the moment. And so having the deck and being able to just bust that out and playing a little bit of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sh mutant ninja turtles shredders revenge for like 15 20 minutes here or there was has really been

great and then like i was able to hand it over to the kids and like you try this what's the it'll turn on pretty darn yeah yeah yeah it turns on about as fast as you'd expect a device like that to turn on and off the only thing that's really kind of slow on it is the switching in and out of desktop mode because it's starting like a whole new display server or something but that's been it's been nice um just having something that i have readily available i pick it up and i play games for a little bit and i put it back down and because i know this sounds so obvious to you guys but once you have like this appliance in your hand because all of the games I've ever bought on Steam are available, I have a huge selection of games.

And then the thing that was super cool is as I was playing with Silverblue on the Dev 1, I installed Steam, and then I could just play those same games. I picked those games right back up on the Dev 1. And I was playing them, and I'm like, this is actually pretty great. It's a pretty nice combo. So week two, still pretty happy with the deck. I did not yet, but I got a new USB-C dock that arrived. I'm going to hook that up probably this next week or so

and play around with that. Ooh, try it out as more of a computer. Yeah, and maybe also just, I don't know, for funsies, hook up a physical keyboard and do like a Wazda shooter game with a mouse and keyboard. Turn the tablesazda shooter game. Oh, yeah. Turn the tables. I like it. Yeah, why not?

Right. So we'll see. See how that goes. And now it is time for the boost. Our first boost today comes from acerbic. Six days ago, 6,210 sets. Loving the fountain app. Loving the Fountain app. Thanks for the tip.

Have you looked into the Impervious browser from impervious.ai at all? I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Here's the good stuff coming. Cheers, Acerbic. Thanks, Acerbic. Impervious.ai. Have you looked into this at all?

No, new to me. A pragmatic layer that sits on top of the Lightning network. Developers can leverage the impervious API to easily build peer-to-peer data transmission. Whoa, man, that's a lot. That's a lot. I would have to look into that. You should build something on that and tell us how it works.

Layer three. Here, I'm just getting to layer two. Yeah, well, layer one's Bitcoin. Layer two's the Lightning. And layer three is whatever that is. We're about to find out. Yeah, I mean, I prefer a seven-layer dip, so bring him on. That's what I was saying.

When do the beans come in? I get some, like, IPFS vibes off this thing, even though I haven't really dove in, but I wonder if it's similar. Well, six days ago, the Golden Dragon boosted in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. I'm a duck, D-U-K, duck. Load it with talent. And the Big Dragon's been listening live, so he boosted in and said, you know, if we had tech pants that were penguin themed, I think I'd buy some. Hint, hint, hint, hint. We need a swag person. If anybody out there's a swag person.

What about like a tech robe is that a thing that couldn't yeah well the robes need to happen too but i would like some tech robe just like a robe mixed with cargo pants so it's just like a robe with like pockets for all your tech yeah you gotta have like the tablet pocket yeah right i think it has hooks for like cable loops that you probably have a gimbal for your streaming you know yeah you gotta mike from coda radio is like on a sustained campaign to get the robe started again. So that's probably going to have to happen at some point in the future. But I feel like some super comfy pants with the bearded tux on them, I feel like those would be really good.

You know, because last week Microsoft had the tech pants. Do you think they want to do a crossover with us? Yeah, maybe a collab. Uh-huh. Yeah, we could collab. PBX Microsoft. We could collab. PBX, Microsoft. We could collab on the Soch, you know. Wouldn't that be great?

The Golden Dragon double boosted in with another 2,222 sets. But honest and truly, I am Robin Hood. It says, I live in Plasma and I've been a big fan of XFCE, but I've moved to a window manager with an XFCE taskbar.

You know, this is an interesting setup where you can mix and match pieces like this of the Linux desktop back in my day. You could really, with GNOME, you could replace Mutter, you know, what we consider Mutter now. You could swap out different backends. I mean, you could take it to the next level. Back in my day, Wes, you could mix and match your window managers with your back ends and your front ends.

You could swap all day long. See, I was about to say, Golden Dragon, don't egg him on. I'm excited for Plasma up in here and finally get XFC. I swear I'm cursing that thing every other week. We have XFC on the recording machine, and I think it's time to go. And then we got a triple boost from the Golden Dragon six days ago. 10.24 sats. He calls it the Gigabyte Sats.

May Brent's gas tank and whatever else you may need be fulfilled by sats. Oh, that is so kind. That is great because we are raising funds to get Brent out to the studio before the road trip to work on some projects. And so we have him in as a 50-50 split for the month of shows to build up a little bit of a piggy bank to get him down here. It's about a day and a half, two-day drive, which is about $3,000 in gas. No, I'm kidding. These days. Not really, but yeah.

these days not really but yeah and then a quad boost from the golden dragon 2222 sats says you were sharp right off the cuff on the pre-show he's watching live and appreciating the west in action that's so sweet i think that was a covid addle just set up rushed to set up a home studio west so yeah it's probably a little spicy yeah you was a COVID adult just set up, rushed to set up a home studio. So yeah, it's probably a little spicy. Yeah, you were a little spicy. We love it though. Todd also wrote in from Northern VA. Was that Virginia?

Virginia? Is that what that is? You got it. Five days ago with 11,111 sets. Cause I'm a back home baller. If I want something, I just holler. So this baller is boosting the dip. Ah, very nice.

Yep, cheap sats right now. I wonder, I wonder for how much longer. I suspect longer, but I may be wrong on that. And we don't care. Still the same good old sats to us. We just love this as a great method to get into the show and support us and, again, make sure the audience stays the number one customer.

Our next boost comes in from XthumbsX five days ago with a thousand sats. How about a brunch with Brent with someone from the Dark Table team? That is an idea right there. You know, this, I have a list of, like, possible brunchers and some pretty big whales on there as well. And the Darktable team members have been like, I think they were number two on that list. And so, yeah, that would be amazing if we can make that happen. I don't see why not. Very good.

Very good. I like that idea a lot. All right. The next boost comes in from Marcel. And we're going to probably institute a thousand sats or above boost policy to get the next boost comes in from Marcel. And we're going to probably institute a thousand sats or above boost policy to get the whole note read in the show. But occasionally, I think I want to pull some forward. But the idea being just to kind of tighten up this segment so that way it doesn't run on and on. But Marcel boosted in with a total of 666

sats. And the first boost was, I remember DroidCam, but can you use it without being in anger? And I thought this was funny because this is a saying that you picked up in the last year or so. I mean, you probably had it longer, but we hear it more often. What does it mean? I mean, like when you've really used a tool, right? You've had to be angry with it. You've used it in a dark situation. You've had to make it work.

Under pressure. Yeah, right? You know, you've actually embraced it. It wasn't just the easy few top common use cases. It's been in production for a while. It was live stream time, you just get this thing set up, it was brand new.

It's like, that's a pressure situation. That's a good place to review a piece of software, too. You know, I tried out another, I forget what it was called after a look because it didn't work super well, but I was trying to find a similar setup. I was like, can I reuse this on my work mac you know because like why not it looked it looked better than the built-in webcam so yeah and at least the most common ones i could find none of them had the sweet like you know video for linux 2 loopback setup so it would let me like record

and even had some fancy ai effects and stuff in the in this mac version but like didn't make it easy to make import it into my team's call or whatever isn't that just the difference right there you know they are building that end of ventura but you got to buy like a accessory to make it work i think like a clip something that actually goes and like implements the apis that they've added or whatever well it's like an nfc equipped device that activates this the function in the phone then connects over like a direct wi-fi connection to the it's like this whole setup. But yeah. But like on Linux, you can have it today. Maybe it's not as slick.

Right. But it worked pretty good for you. Right? So. Alright, boost two from Marcel. Why doesn't the Steam deck just shrink and scroll the terminal window when the keyboard is open? You know, like you have on phones. This seems like problem solved. Now the issue there, Marcel, is that I don't think the terminal's aware. And I got problem solved. Now, the issue there, Marcel,

is that I don't think the terminal's aware. And I got some insight. The keyboard opens up on the screen. Thank you to whoever sent this in. The keyboard opens up on the screen depending on where the mouse cursor is, not the content of the screen. Yeah.

So there you go. And then we had a third boost. Come on, Brent. You know you want to go on a coast-to-coast Canada meetup tour. Is this true? I mean, who says I haven't previously? I think we should totally do this.

I mean, there's a lot of area to cover between those coasts and Canada. Not dissimilar to the U.S., but a few key spots. I don't see why not. And I might even be able to convince, like, one of my American buddies to join me. Mic Mac boosts in three days ago. Oh, a row of ducks. Two thousand two hundred and twenty two cents. Thank you very much.

And here's something for your trouble. Because who doesn't love the ducks? Long time listener. Really appreciate the network. Thanks for the great content, guys. Thank you, Mic Mac. There's been a few first time boosters in the last couple of weeks, and that's been really, really gratifying to see and grateful because I'm grateful because not only is it a bit of a journey, I recognize that, and we're asking you to try out a new technology. And, of course, we're just crazy enough to ask you to do it when the market's crashed and Bitcoin's dead, right? And of course, we're thinking long-term,

this is free freedom for money, like the GPL was freedom for software. And so if we can build out a network of users that are on this system, and then we can start supporting free software projects, I think that's going to be a win-win for everyone, Micmac. And we may just be putting some code where our mouth is on that front in the future.

We'll share details on that if we get that far. But it is something that is in active discussions right now. Torched Escape boosted in two days ago with 15,000 cents. Oh, all right. I'm a back home baller in pajamas that cost $10. Tell my mother that I love her more than any freaking other. That's a life of the back home baller I think Torch Tear wants to help out that Cross Canada tour

because they write in, A few more drops in the tank. Thanks for the great show. Ah, thank you, Jeff. I think he actually secretly wants me to go south. Well, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, if you come along with us on the road trip, we'll end up at Jeff's house.

So you got to get to the studio first to make it. But we got big plans. Jeff is a listener who has been around for a long time. He often pops in the mumble room during the show. So that's another way he's shown value. But in the past, years ago, he came to where we had Jupes parked and help us get electricity hooked up. So we had full electrical hookups. electricity hooked up. So we had full electrical hookups. And now he has built a parking spot in his backyard that can accommodate jupes in California. So we have a destination where

we can park and hook up and have internet and air conditioning and, you know, have dog buddies. So it's pretty great. Jeff's a pretty great guy and we super appreciate him. And we have a couple of thank you boosts. great jeff's a pretty great guy and we super appreciate him and we have a couple of thank you boosts 5 000 sats from lt guy 450 sats from nick's bitcoin is amazing saying that he loves the duck hunt hit yeah who doesn't i mean come on i know andre sent 500 sats for a little bit of gas money for brent thank you cb sent 777 sats saying, how do you make an algorithm soup taste better? You toss in a bullion cube. Aw.

You know, we need like a, you know, like a drum kick setup. Bum-pah. I think I can figure that out. Yeah. 222 sats from Fuzz Mistborn. First time boost. I'm glad Chris likes his Steam Deck. I still love mine four months later,

although I rarely use desktop mode. 222 stats from 47. Says Python's great to break sites. 222 stats from user 426, just to say hi. Thank you, everybody. Hi, user 426. We appreciate you helping us stay independent, keeping us honest to our audience,

and sending in your value for the show using a podcasting 2.0 app at newpodcastapps.com. You can also use Boost CLI if you don't want to switch apps, which nobody did this week. Or you can use Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z.technology. And if you want to hear me go on about the podcast industry in general and Podcasting 2.0 and the features that JB will be implementing in the future. I do, I do. Well, then go check out the Podcasting 2.0 show over at the podcast index.org, because I was just on there. Do you remember it was an episode 91 or four? I should know. I was just listening to it.

I know. I should know too. I have it right here. Episode 94 bells out. If you want to check that out at the podcasting 2.0 show, I was on there with Adam and Dave and it was a lot of fun. Thank you everybody for boosting in. Did you hit your JB bell? Is that why it was named like that? There may have been a little bit of a bell off in the show. I don't want to give any spoilers. All right. I had some bell history with Adam that needed to get sorted out. That's just, I'll just say that. That was really, it was a lot of fun. And with that, we do have a few picks.

Yeah, I think this qualifies as a quick pick. You and I were doing office hours, I believe, and I was having struggles several weeks ago with some of my network connections. And you and I were both pinging to try to figure out if it was you or if it was me. And we just said, hey, there's this feature we really want, which is sort of inline summaries of the ping. Because previously, like an animal, you and I have been like stopping the ping process to get the summary of how many packets were lost. And one of our wonderful listeners, I forget exactly who it was, but thank you, thank you,

suggested you just hit control four and you'll get an inline. Yeah. Sort of summary. During the active ping. It's a game changer. You don't have to control C your ping to get the stats. You knew this, didn't you, Wes?

Wes didn't even react at all. You knew this, didn't you? You knew this and you didn't tell us. I didn't know. I just don't ping that much. I feel like I use something like MTR if I want more active stats. Come on with the MTR. This is a great tip, though.

I'm trying it right now. It is nice. It is nice. All right. I got a hot pick for you guys. I got a real hot pick. This is so freaking handy. You can thank me with a boost.

It's just simply called audio sharing, and it is the simplest application possible. It's available however you want it, and I've linked to the Flathub here page. But say you want your audio on a different device from your computer, right? Oh, yeah. Say maybe you've got a speaker, you've got a mobile device, you want to take the audio with you, whatever it is, right? Maybe you want to watch it on your televisions. I don't know what you're doing, but you want remote audio from your laptop, your desktop, whatever. This quickly and instantly creates an RTSP server with an audio stream from your desktop available.

And so like on my iPhone here, I open up VLC. I paste in that RTSP address that it gives you. It also gives you a QR code you can scan. And then immediately VLC begins playing back my computer's audio. And I can even mute my local speakers like on my laptop and the audio will continue to play. So then I can walk away with my phone and continue to hear the video that I was listening to on my laptop from my phone. Any device that can stream RTSP, you can do this with. And it's instantaneous. You just put this app on there

on your machine and then you'll launch it and then open up in VLC or whatever you use to look at RTSP streams. And now you have the remote audio from your Linux box. It's so nice. I was using it this weekend, obviously, as you can tell, I was, I got, I started a talk on, on silver blue and then it was like, I got to go outside. I i got stuff to do put the headphones on with my phone and just streamed it to my phone as i walked around the yard it was choice does it at all offer media controls as well or do you have to do that natively or how is that process so you're you're not gonna get like play and pause right because it's just receiving a stream but you'll get of course mute and pause on local on your local client but you can't stop the remote stream.

But you may be able to just pair that with something like KDE Connect. Oh, sure. Sure you could. That would work pretty well, actually. Sure. You could take it to the next level. I feel like I missed. You didn't play a certain soundboard clip?

Oh, is it? Did I miss that it's... Yeah. Wait, let me check. Oh! It's Rust-based, huh? That's right. Well, it launches quick. It's like you let me check it. Oh, it's rust based, huh? That's right.

Well, it launches quick. You didn't even look in the repo. This is the thing about flatbacks, man. You just slap them on your system. You don't even pay attention to the dependencies. It doesn't even matter anymore.

It's the brave new world. All right. Well, we got to wrap it up because it's getting hot in here, but I did have one more pick. I mentioned that I was playing my old DOS games got star trek judgment rights going i got voyager elite force going i got star trek away team going i got diablo going i mean some of these games were literally pre-windows that's how old some of these games are okay bottles i know you guys probably know

about it but i'm gonna give it a mention right right now. There is no splicker way to just set up a wine environment and get stuff installed, tweak the settings. I can't believe what you can run with wine these days. So many applications, so many of our audio plug-ins that we, like the special emergency repair plug-ins that we sometimes have to use that are all Windows-based, we can run them in wine now. The games I'm looking at, I can run in wine. So many desktop applications Are running under Wine It has really gotten impressive And Bottles

Is a front end That lets you set up Different environments So you can have like A Windows 7 environment You can have a DOS environment You can have a Windows 10 environment It's cool

It'll also let you pull in Like dependencies like fonts And GPU Oh nice GPU stuff Yeah It's especially You know

It's amazing where Wine's at Especially because I feel like if someone told me they were starting the wine project today, I might be a little skeptical. But after all of this time and all of this effort, it has really gotten to an amazing place. Bottles is so, so good. And it's good at telling you what it's doing and giving you status updates. It's good at letting you manage the processes when a wine process hangs. It's just all the things. All the things. So bottles is just a big recommend.

And then audio sharing, which we'll have a link to all of that, of course, in the show notes. It's real simple. Linux unplugged dot com slash four six eight. And if you want more show, don't forget, we do have the live stream goes on nice and long, lots, lots of extra content in there. We try to make it interesting. And then we make that available to our members as a thank you as well. Our members also get access to an ad free version of the show unplugged core dot com for that or Jupiter dot party for all the shows. And don't miss Linux action news.

I feel like we need a new plug for Linux action action news but it's a companion to this show if you're not getting linux action news you're missing out on the world of free software and open source like there's a lot going on and we try to hone that sucker in and get you really just what you need to know get you in get you out make it really information dense yeah but if you're missing that you don't have the same context we do for the nonsense we talk about on this show. Could be true. That could be a thing. We try not to, but that could be a thing. And of course, sometimes we do have schedule changes.

And we try to get those listed at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Hint, hint, hint on that one. The stream is at jupiter.tube. If you'd like to watch the archive, the playback version, or catch it live when we are live, jupiter.tube for that. I've got the archive, the playback version, or catch it live when we are live. jupyter.tube for that. I've got a lot of URLs.

I feel like I should stop mentioning them, so I'll just give one more plug for the JPL lottery sign-up form. Linuxunplugged.com slash JPL. Simple. It's right there. It'll take you to our next cloud. Well, one of them. We've got only like three of them, so that's one of our three next

clouds. You gotta have more than one, you know, for safety. Yeah. Yeah. And all the other meetups at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. All right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And I hope to see you right back here. Not on Tuesday, but on Sunday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි I actually wanted to get back over with Brent because there was a bit that we didn't get to here in the show notes. And I'm curious what he's got in mind. I see it's just simply titled System76 Teaser. Yeah, I came across a little, I think I'm going to call it like a little nugget. I was trying to solve this Raspberry Pi, you know, install from one USB onto another issue.

And so as we do, doing a bunch of research, and I came across an issue on that Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI firmware image GitHub that I was playing with. And so the little nugget is that there may or may not be a System76 employee in there asking a few questions on perhaps how to get a POP2204 ARM64 image working with EFI in there, which is not exactly a public image at this point, but I think something we're there working on internally. Look at you with the teasers. Right. I'm excited for you to continue your Raspberry Pi

journeys, Brent, although I'm sorry that it started so rough. It's going to get easier in the future as finally we are going to have mainline graphics core support. Hardware accelerated graphics with the Pi 4 cores.

That is exciting. Which has been missing for a very, very, very long time. It's the reason why Fedora 37 is going to have official support for the Pi 4 series, because the graphics core is now finally mainline. And here I thought I was

excited about Fedora 37 already. Will that be just in time for the Pi 5 to come out?