LINUX Unplugged - 473: End of the Road

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

We've reached the end of the road in our immutable Linux series, and an old friend stops by to give us the inside scoop on Endless OS. Plus, we announce who will be joining us at JPL in September. Special Guest: Cassidy James Blaede.

I think we got to talk about this. A new Dell XPS Ubuntu edition has shipped, and I have a ton of respect for what our friends over at Dell have done with the Sputnik line. And I understand that they're just kind of revalidating and rebadging an existing product. You know, there is an XPS 13 for Windows. But the XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition

has what they call a new radical look. And it seems that Dell's design team is about four years behind Apple. We've got what is essentially a butterfly chiclet keyboard. The function row has been replaced by touch LED lights. There's no escape key. And it has two ports, USB-C, both. Why? I think it was well proven that these things were not helpful for anyone. I wonder what the meeting room was like that day. Right. After years of Apple getting grief from MacBook customers about the touch bar and getting rid of the escape key, and then them specifically after years reverting those changes,

and just as they do that, Dell comes out with this. And I don't get it because it also feels like now is the worst time to mess this kind of thing up in this product category. Dell essentially helped create part of this category with the Sputnik line, along with others like System76. It was their game to lose. They were the largest OEM. They were one of the best options for enterprises that wanted an Ubuntu system. And with this, it feels like they're just ceding their market to their competitors with the Dev1 and the new Lemur and other laptops. Like, lots of Linux laptops now. Some directly from distributions. Is this maybe a signal that even with the seemingly good support that the community has shown for adopting Sputnik, laptops now, some directly from distributions. setting the direction for this whole line are receiving up the chain. Because as you say, right, like, the good side of this is they're committed to making

a Linux version of what they're selling. The bad side is it doesn't seem like what Linux users might want is exactly factoring up into what that product looks like. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Les. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen.

Coming up on the show today, we're going to take Sleeper Distro, maybe you've heard of but never really looked at, packed full of modern Linux technologies, even though it has kind of a more traditional long-term support release cycle. And it is also the final distribution in our summer of immutable Linux journey. And it is fittingly Endless OS. An old friend is going to join the show in a little bit and go deep into Endless OS with us. Plus, today is the day we are pulling names from our JPL hat to determine who is

actually going to join us for our JPL tour. Then we'll round out the show with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Good morning. Hello, Chris. Hey, Brent. And hey, Wes. Hello, you guys. Hello, hello. Great to see you in there. Plus, I think a record setter for our quiet listening room Hello, everybody. Also, a big good morning to Tailscale. Our friends over at tailscale.com have created a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard's noise protocol.

It's like peak WireGuard implementation, the kind of thing you hope somebody would build when we first started talking about WireGuard. It's here, and it's a game changer. Go build a mesh network just for yourself using Tailscale. Go say good morning and get it for free up to 20 devices at tailscale.com. So this week, Gnome launched a new telemetry program to help, quote, improve Gnome. We've talked about data collection before on the show with mixed opinions, I think, from the virtual lug and from your hosts. Gnome has created this tool directly. It's not pre-installed on any distribution or with any

version of Gnome. It collects your Linux distro and its version, obviously, your hardware OEM, model CPU, et cetera, that it can kind of grok from the system. It checks to see if you have Flatpak. And if you do, if Flathub is enabled, it looks to see what applications in Gnome are pinned to the dock, you know, your favorites in GNOME. It checks to see what GNOME extensions you have installed. I think we should come back to that. And it checks to see what your default browser is. It's called GNOME Info Collect. And it's out there right now for anyone who wants to grab it and run it on their own system. They've got SUSE packages available, Arch package available, Fedora package available, and a Snap available. I don't know. I'm curious to know what you think, guys.

But this seems to me like perhaps the best compromise we have seen yet of this information collected. It's voluntary. You have to go get it yourself in the download page where you go to get it. They tell you what they're collecting. Wes, you gave it a go before the show. I did. Although, you know, I thought I'd try to be a little bit of a troll and try it out on a plasma system. It was too smart for that, though. So, yeah, no dice. You got to run it from a GNOME system.

But it's super simple. I really like that. It's just a little Python app. They do ask for some help getting it packaged. So if those are skills you have, maybe go take a look. But it's really easy to run. It doesn't have a ton of dependencies. And, of course, it's all open source, seemingly including the bits that run the server. Oh, that's an interesting observation. I wasn't aware of dependencies. And of course, it's all open source, seemingly including the bits that run the

server. Oh, that's an interesting observation. I wasn't aware of that. I noticed it's not yet packaged for Nix, though I think someone in our Nix nerds matrix chat room did create a flake for it, right? Looking at you, Kenji. That's great, Kenji. Thank you. Brent, how do you feel about this stuff? I know you're probably one of the more privacy conscious ones on the show. This is pretty voluntary. It doesn't come pre-shipped, although I actually think it'd be more beneficial if it did. And at the end of the GNOME setup wizard, it asked you to collect this info

because you're going to get such a tiny skewed demo that downloads and tries this. But is this just the compromise we have to make? Well, I think having a choice is actually really refreshing. We've talked about this several times in the past, I think, but to have it be written in a language and be open source so at least if you're really interested you can go see what's happening uh and that they're so upfront about what's being collected i think it's really helpful and that to me even feels like okay well if that's what

they're looking for i could see from a developer's point of view how useful that might be for them to target certain systems and certain applications and user interfaces and stuff like that. So I think it's really just the transparency that's helpful. If you know what they're collecting and you think it's helpful and you want to help in that way, and that's a good way for you to help, then I don't see why this is harmful in any way.

So I would say let it be a choice and let them be upfront about it in the installer too. It's helpful. I am almost hesitating to really say this, but it's happening. As GNOME becomes feature complete or they settle on the features they want to support, doesn't it seem natural that they would look towards extensions and what extensions their community are using the most and then seeing if they have a way they could just safely build that into GNOME itself? And so one of the things that jumped out at me on this is they're checking to see what extensions are installed on a GNOME system.

And I think that could be a significant data point for them. In my personal opinion, I think for a long time, there's been a culture of underplaying extensions for some of the GNOME developers. And so getting data like this, where you're going to see there is some consistent extensions. And I can just tell this is, you know, I've been using GNOME very consistently since GNOME 3.12. I took a break for a little while, but came back around 3.12. And I've always had it on some of my systems since then. And you can tell if anybody who's been running it for this long, you can look at the extension page. You can see what developers update after a GNOME release.

You can sort by popularity. You get an idea of which ones are getting feedback. And you can tell some of those extensions are probably on like 80% of GNOME systems out there. They're just maybe pre-installed by a distro maker. So it'd be great for them to get that signal. And you got to appreciate that, you know, of course, like all open source projects, GNOME has limited time and resources. So I like how they've framed

some of this data collection around like, how much should we be investing in static workplaces? Are people using them? Now, obviously, there's some issues around folks with installs that aren't going to configure this and how this all plays out. But it seems reasonable to sort of say, like, hey, this is an easy way for you to help shape the future of the software you're using. There's also the possibility that somebody like me who does, like, static workspace on my secondary screens and a moving workspace on my main screen, that's been working really well for me. Maybe I'm the only person that uses that

and so they decide by the data they're going to take that away. And I'll be sad. So I should prepare myself for that kind of thing. Go install it on more systems maybe. I'll go spin up 30 VMs. Dan, you were pointing out that Plasma is doing something similar as well, right? Yeah, they have the KUserFeedback thing that is incorporated.

So I probably knew that, but I think I just totally forgot about KUserFeedback. But I'm glad. I'm glad they have it. Yeah, it's set to disabled by default, but you can increase the amount of information you want to give them. I'm all for it. Volunteer the information you want on the systems you don't want on the grid. Don't install these tools. Don't use these tools. It's a really nice compromise. Kenji brought up another point that's worthwhile, I think,

maybe is, are we going to get to see these stats down the road? So all the stuff to collect it is open, but what kind of... Is it going to be just internal to the GNOME team, or is it going to be published in some way? I didn't see any answers about that, although I didn't do a ton of searching admittedly that's a great question i hadn't even thought of that i'd like to know why not i bet they will i'll read through i'll read through their uh github post and see if they say it i actually don't remember recall them

addressing it but it looks like you know the back end's open source they're being really transparent about all of this i wouldn't be too surprised if we see that. Now we're doing a little cleaning right here at the top of the show. So we got some housekeeping for you. Big updates for our West Coast meetups. The venues are in. And with a little bit of planning, it turned out that we're going to breweries for all of them. It's a brewery tour, and they're all incredible.

Every single venue looks fantastic. And this is a big thank you to our West Coast crew. Our Matrix Room helped my wife, Adia, narrow down all of the best possible venues. So, if you're in Southern Oregon area,

and I hope even nearby, if you're in the Sacramento area, if you're in the Southern California area, if you're in the Portland area, we've got meetups for you. We've got swag getting jupes road ready she's gonna be looking sharp when you see her she'll she'll be nearby at some of these places so go sign up we need to know if you're coming or not so we can start telling the venues how many people to expect meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting for that and then get in that west coast crew chat room that's bit.ly slash west coast crew it It's pretty easy. I thought it should be West Coast Crew with no T, but I got outvoted. Get the West Crew in there. Get the West Crew representing. I feel like that might be the Knicks nerds chat room. I bet they're a bunch of

West fans. Alright, well, so now before we get into our main topic today, we've been waiting weeks to pull the names out of the hat to see who will go to JPL. Wes has run the scripts. All right, here we go. Coming in right now. We have a chosen few.

I'll say first names, but we'll be reaching out via email as well. Michael J., you are in. Fern, you are in. Valdahl? Why you got to do me like that? You're in. AJS, you're in. Greg, you are in.

Oliver T. is in. Anyone, Andrew, you're in. Joshua M. is in. Bloodpath, you're in. Nice one. I look forward to telling JPL that Bloodpath will be in. Joshua M is in. Blood Path, you're in. Nice one. I look forward to telling JPL that Blood Path will be attending. That'll be good.

This is what we got when we allowed handles for submissions. But it seems natural for our community. Mikey G, you are in. Tyler L, you are in. Eric P, you are in. Jonathan M, you are in. David H, you are in. And Mr. Optimus Gray is in. We have a few others we may be reaching out to directly as well,

because I didn't see Jeremy's name in this list, but we do have a slot for listener Jeremy who wrote in too. Oh, yeah. These were just the ones that were, you know. Right. Rando picked right there. Boom. Very good.

Congratulations, everybody. Thank you so much for signing up and we hope to see you there well you better come because you committed but you are the chosen few you check the box if you can't just no no hard feelings just let us know as soon as you find that out we've got some reserve names that we will draw from in the event that happens yep so if you didn't hear your name called you are probably then on the reserve list that was neat that worked out really well. Again, we used our NextCloud instance to do this.

So it's all using a free software stack. And then Wes used some tools we'll talk about in a little bit in the show to sort of sort everything out and parse it. But there you go. Oh, my gosh. That's a big moment. We actually have our list of JPL Tour attendees. It's real.

It's real now. I got an email from Tim a couple of days ago, which I got to get back to. It said, uh, Hey, what's your schedule? So we had to get,

we had to get this done, right? We had to figure this out. So we got it figured out and hopefully we got it with enough time. Everybody can get their travel plans in. But like Wes said, if you can't, you can contact the show,

Linux unplugged.com slash contact, or reach out to myself or Wes and let us know when we can slot someone else in on that list. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account and you go there to support the show. Linode makes cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible. It's fast and reliable. It's the best hosting in the business. Real humans every day can help you. And it's what we've used for every project we've built and deployed in the cloud for nearly three years now. It's really powerful. It's fast. 11 data centers around the world. And they have an interface that everyone on our team can interact with at their own skill level. Like you can use backend automation

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absolutely love you put it all together with the performance the support and then it really seals the deal with the pricing they're 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the major hyperscalers out there but better than that guys this is the model you want this is the model where you get a linux box where you can ssh into a linux box and you actually get root access and you can control the system, right? The hyperscalers, it's all abstracted away from you with their esoteric language and their esoteric names and their esoteric interface. And God, I like saying esoteric because it's so true for those different, I don't know, I'll just call them hyperscalers. I won't start swearing, but you know how I feel about it. Like that is not the future that I want

to see. I mean, I'm glad that's a product for some people, but I want Linux systems that I can get access to. I can install the packages I can manage. That's my infrastructure. And that's the model Linode is continuing to make awesome and excellent. And they're doing it with the best performance, the best support and 11 data centers for you to choose from. Go build something, go learn something, try it for yourself and support the show. That $100 really lets you try it. Linode.com slash unplugged. One more time.

Go support the show and try it out. Linode.com slash unplugged. Back home baller. Damn straight, y'all. Yeah, that's right. It's time for some baller boosts. First up from T. Cario with 30,000 Satoshis. Cause I'm a back home baller. If I want something, I just holler.

A longtime listener crashed her mumble server at one time with emojis. Hey, ouch, T. Cario, but thanks for owning up to it anyway. Just want to say thanks for putting this together week after week it's been a great journey and this is the one podcast i have always looked forward to for years now keep it real hey you keep it real t cario we really appreciate you yeah thank you tc that's amazing your baller boost also helped put us on one of the top boosted lists for the fountain.fm podcast player. So thank you very much.

We didn't get a ton of boost this week, but this definitely made up for it. So thank you very much. We got the boost that mattered. Speaking of, here's a boost from our friend Gene Bean with 13,370 sats. Because I'm a back home baller. You might be interested in this one, Chris. Gene Bean writes, I think I've found a good meetup.com alternative.

He does note you can hit him up on Matrix if you want some more details, but the short version, I asked around on the Fostodon Mastodon server and got a lot of good feedback about Mobilizon? I don't know how to say that. Mobilizon! And a few other services, though. Mobilizon? I don't know how to say that. Mobilizon! And a few other services,

though. Mobilizon seemed like the best fit for your guys' possible needs. I did a little bit of time looking into this, and it looks like it's a free Libre and open-source software set maintained by the same folks behind PeerTube, uh, Fromasoft. What? Really? Oh, lovely. How do we not know about this? I wonder if it's like a play on mobilization. I think it's French. So I'm sure I A, said it wrong and B, we're missing several layers of nuance. Mobilison. Oh, Brent knows it. Yes, I do. I have the French tongue. I got to say, I've legit never heard of this. I've heard of some of the others like Get Together and whatnot. Never seen this. So this is super interesting. I really appreciate that.

I will definitely take a look at that. Have you guys ever heard of this one? No, but it's got a nice website and yeah, it might be worth a look. That's great. Well, thank you very much. If you'd like to send us a boost, you can get a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com. What we're doing now is we're splitting out the baller boosts from the regular boosts, I guess. We appreciate all of them.

But what we're doing is for the last half of the show, towards the end of the show, we're going to pivot to just boost quality. The signal is what we'll choose for which boosts make it into the show. So we have a special spot to thank the people who are helping support the show directly with the baller boosts. And then later on in the show for the feedback section, any boost is welcome. It just has to meet a certain threshold of signal, I suppose. I don't like that. I don't want to make that sound bad, though, but I hope you get what we mean. Just trying to keep it tidy. We can only read so many. Thank you, Boost. But they mean a lot to us. We just have to edit for the show sometimes. That's basically it. We read them all and we appreciate them all. All right, guys, let's talk about Endless OS. Endless was founded in 2012 in San Francisco, California, by Matthew Dalio and Marcelio Sampeo. And then in April of 2015, it probably got on all of our radar. I know we covered it at JB when they launched a Kickstarter. They raised $176,000 with 1,041 backers in less than 30 days. And initially they were really going to focus on

hardware. Over the years, they've pivoted more to focusing just on the software. On April 1st, 2020, Endless became a nonprofit organization known as the Endless OS Foundation. Endless is based on Debian, roughly, with a whole lot of customizations. It is an immutable OS based on OS tree and a lot of flat packs. And we wanted to kick the tires and see if this was the implementation truly designed for a workstation, for end users, maybe for family, for an office setting. Brent, why don't we start with your experience? Yeah, I was really excited to try Endless. I've heard about it for years. i think it was back in like 2018 i started poking my eyes on it and keeping track of it and they're doing a bunch of really

neat stuff around education and outreach to you know countries that don't have super fast internet so they've got a bunch of really neat features around that so that that's what got me interested at first and i knew oh i know you too And I figured you'd focus on the technical bits. So I thought, well, I'm just going to approach this from a usability and sort of user-friendliness standpoint. And I think you both know I'm pretty good at that. So things were going pretty well. I, unfortunately, though, started running into a few frustrating issues.

I'm here testing Endless OS and feeling some frustrations. I really want to like Endless OS. There's some really nice stuff about it and some well thought out sections, but I'm running into some performance issues, which I never expected. I was originally running it in a virtual machine on my ThinkPad X250. And it was running kind of slow. And I thought, okay, I'm going to give it a good chance. So I pulled out my workstation and installed it on an SSD, internal SSD, because I thought I'm going to give it the best chance possible. And I'm running into some issues so there's in particular i think a great example of how frustrating this is is there's one of the 12 icons that appears in the launcher

it's called system which is a little bit confusing i thought it was going to be like system information or something like that it ends up being which i think is also great ends up being a teaching tool for computer internals and it's uh like graphically cartoony and looks kind of fun but it just brings the entire system to a halt the graphics are super glitchy whenever you move the mouse one of the cores on my cpu which has six it's not a slouch of a computer it's uh i guess it's an amd aphenom uh 21075t graphics are mdrs 880 so it's an old thing it's got eight gigs of ram it's an old thing but um not not a slouch by any means and uh yeah one of the processors just get pegged whenever you have this thing open and you're scrolling your mouse around it, but it also just brings the entire system to a halt

to the point where it feels like I'm running this on a Raspberry Pi or something. And that is so frustrating. I, it is like the slowest experience that I've had in a long time. And maybe it's just that application, but it seems like the whole system just comes to a halt. Just wasn't performing the way you wanted there, eh, Brent? Yeah, and to be fair, I think it was that particular application that was causing that issue. Unfortunately, it was the very first icon I clicked on when I booted Endless for the first time. So, because I thought, oh, that looks interesting. Yeah, I did pretty similar too. And it just kills the performance. It's just, yeah. Yeah. And I don't know why that is because they have another application called Hack, which is a teaching tool for coding. And it's, it has a very similar feel to it in terms of like

the graphics that are presented as a user interface. And yet it seemed to perform perfectly. So there's gotta be something there and maybe it's fairly trivial for them to address that. And I don't think it's necessarily a perfect representation of the rest of the experience, but I have to say it took, it took the whole experience down several notches for me because I just, well, it just, it just wasn't great. But there were some other things that I really loved. Like the login screen was super simplistic, but had a ton of accessibility options, like more than I even knew existed, which I think maybe considering their audience, they're trying to make it as inclusive as possible.

So that was really cool to see. But I did run into a bunch of other paper cuts and I'll be curious to hear your experiences. Like, you know, my internet isn't very fast here in my little cabin. Yes, I'm back home, everyone. Hello, Canada. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna try their metered,

selecting my wifi as a metered connection. I just thought, well, see what happens. And I got some weird things happening. Like one of the things that happened in the software updater was that it suggested it was downloading the newer version of Endless OS. The installer I had was a little bit of an outdated version. So it suggested it was downloading, but it never would, nor could I cancel it, and nor could I kick it off, you know, on purpose. And so that was my intention with using the metered connection was like, well, I don't want things to download in the background because I have some productivity that I want to get done and downloading huge ISOs

or whatever sometimes can take an hour or two here. I'm sure that's an easy fix as well, but was just another one of those, oh, it's not quite where I want it to be. And I ran into something similar to with just trying to set a shortcut key for the terminal. I was just looking to set a keyboard shortcut and, you know, it asks for what the terminal application name is that you want to run. And so I right-clicked on the terminal and went, oh, which terminal is this? And it opened up the software center and just said, Oh, sorry, there's no details for this application. So there was a bunch of these little things that just started getting to me. No dark mode. I know, I know it's

an old GNOME version and I'm sure there's a, an add on that I can do to get a dark mode, but that was, hopefully they get that with a newer version of of gnome when when they update that so i think i didn't ever run into any issues with the underlying os and the technologies there and updating when i did happen was super smooth and most of the interface was exactly as you expect but i in the end found all these little tiny paper cuts just kind of deflated my excitement to try it out, which I feel is very unfortunate. And I hope maybe in a year or so, maybe that'll be a little bit different. But I'm curious to hear what you thought, Chris. So I came at it from a could

this work for my kids standpoint, because I like the idea of an immutable distro for the kids. Just the other day, some updates installed on Fedora 36, and now I'm having trouble getting Dylan's NVIDIA card to work at all. Oh, boy. Like, the system, it sees it when I LSPCI, and it's clearly there. But then, like, nothing I can do now to get the driver to actually work is happening. And I just think to myself, like, well, the primary job of this computer is to play games for him really and it'd be nice if i could just have rolled that back and so an immutable system does seem really appealing and i don't think a lot of the stuff that you hit would really bother him to be honest with you would bother my son dylan i think most of that

it would probably be unnoticed by him but as i was setting it up there were a few things i observed that i just thought were kind of interesting like i, I know you saw this one too, but just like one of the absolutely most unique EULAs I have ever seen in a Linux distro. I don't think the last one's the last time we commented on the EULA, right? It's true. Yeah, right. I did read it. I think you spent half your time with Endless just stuck in the EULA, Brent, if your Slack messages to me were any cute. It's an endless E Eula, really. Well, they have like sections highlighted and stuff like, make sure you see this. I'm like, OK, that's wow.

They're really drawing your attention. And it seems like it's a PDF embedded into the installer, too. Yeah, I had a hard time reading it, actually, on the monitors that I have here, just the way it was scaling the PDF and then it would bound it as well. So I couldn't zoom in enough to really get it legible in a way that I was, I wanted it was so it could use a bit of work, I think. But you did click agree, right? Just so we know if you've, uh, yeah, I read it. I read it first. And then the three of us had about 30 minutes of conversation back and forth about it. And then I hit accept. Yeah, we did. We did discuss it quite a bit. I actually like the way they've done the primary icons for Launcher.

It has a very iPadOS kind of feel, including the folders in which icons hide out in. So unlike most distros, which are turning off desktop icons these days, Endless comes with Hack, which is what Brent was talking about, and Sidetrack, which are those interesting heavy apps. And it comes with Chromium as its default browser. And an app center and rhythm box you know shot well video much stuff right but it's on the desktop like spring pad or whatever springboard they call it on ios it looks like that then of course there is more applications installed and it has a launch bar it and has a search to run your thing so if you want you can just and it's a search and enter to launch kind of thing. And I think all of that would work really, really well for most new users. In fact, I would argue that's probably for new users or average users, that's probably the most accessible desktop

launcher setup I've seen in a long time. I think they nailed that. I don't think it's how most like pro Linux users like it. It's clearly not how upstream gnome does things which is interesting considering endless's relationship with gnome which we'll get to more but yet it's how they're doing things i think the technological appeal to endless os is os tree also they integrate flat packs at a level deeper than i've seen any other distribution like when the system's booting up and you clear the splash screen and you just look at the services starting, you'll see a ton of stuff is actually Flatpak stuff, even at the lower level of the system. I've never seen it integrated that low before. I'll talk about that more with Cassidy.

And it's hard to mess up because of all of these things, because of the Flatpak and because of the immutable nature. It also means that if it's not right, it's harder to tweak it to make it right. But if it's working out of the box and it works for you, it'll pretty much stay that way. That is really nice. You know, having, I think the number one thing I hate

is when I give a family member Linux and then they come back to me in about three months and something broke. And I just find that intolerable, right? And so I think this would prevent those kinds of things. And then ultimately, it's easy to use. It's obvious. I think anyone who has any familiarity with a computer at all could use Endless OS. And not all distributions strike that balance. I don't know if I love it.

I think I prefer seeing what GNOME's doing now. I want the newer stuff now. I already want GNOME 43, right? So Endless just isn't really a distribution for me. But, you know, I don't think Dylan cares what version of GNOME he gets as long as Files works. You know, as long as he can use the system. He doesn't care what version of GNOME it is. He just wants it to be nice.

He wants it to look modern. He wants it to be nice. He sees Dad's setup, and he wants it to look cool like Dad set up. So dark mode would be helpful. What about you, Wes? A few things stand out from what you guys said. One, yeah, the Flatpak implementation is just really nice. And that, to me, it led me down this train of thought here of like, I can't really think of the last time I saw a Linux distribution that felt this productized, and not in a bad way, just like very thoughtfully designed, clearly that these elements have been selected and worked on and honed over the long number of years now that Endless has been around to try to get this experience.

I think maybe there's some questions around if that's really the experience you and I and Brent want for our systems, because we're so used to sort of taking all these bits, especially with experience like you know you and i and brent want for our systems because we're so used to sort of taking all these bits especially with something you know talking of immutability playing with with nix where we're building our own custom systems from whole cloth basically and this is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum but what they've done is it's just really impressive and like you're talking about you know with Dylan, I'm thinking kind of the reverse here. I'm thinking my mom, you know, she's on a older 1804, 2004. Either way, I need to do some updates of Amate's system. I think I might just try Endless next for her.

I can see that being a pretty trouble-free OS in that situation. I did find it a little funny to get started with. I do want to give them a lot of credit for having a lot of different images available. I really enjoyed that they had like a VMDK image if you just want to try it out in a virtual machine. No fuss. They've got Raspberry Pi. They've got Pine stuff. They've got like a lot of different ARM versions. But that also means you have a ton of different things to pick from. And you're like, well, do I want this multi-language? And like they've got these minimal base versions, but then there's also really fat like 16 gig downloads if you want all the stuff baked

in but unless you spend enough time sort of reading all the verbiage to understand what those options are and mean i don't know i could i could see not getting the image i want and then i was also just a little surprised that you end up getting a dottorrent file instead of your ISO or IMG. Yeah, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that. But is the average Endless user fine with that? I don't know. I don't want to presume, but... See, and that's where I have some questions.

I'd be real curious to learn more because on one hand, torrent files are kind of, you know, kind of arcane if you're not a nerd downloading a lot of ISOs or other content. But at the same time, you could see where, you know, some of the use cases that Endless is trying to fit here. Maybe you don't have access to fancy CDNs, but you do have a local community or a local school or a few organizations in a country that have these distributed. And that's where something like torrents might really shine. Yeah, I could also see, though, in school networks, torrents being totally blocked. You know, you just, In a university, I could see them blocking torrent downloads. You know, Wes, to add to your confusion, I found that there were certain downloads of a certain version of endlessOS at endlessOS.com. And then there were a few places

at endlessOS.org where I think more of the development happens where I found more updated versions like 4.0.8, I think it is, is the most recent. And I was a little confused. I guess on the homepage, maybe that's their like super stable, you know, 4.0 release. And that's what they're putting out there. But if you, I was trying to get the latest and greatest version and I found like three different places to get different versions that I thought was a little bit confusing. And the one that they put at endless.org, they actually lead with a Windows installer version. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, there's a lot more to play with here. I gotta say, like, I don't think I've finished my playing around with NLSOS. I mean, as you say, right,

they've got this whole option to like just install it alongside Windows. I definitely, the next time I'm feeling up to actually doing a fresh Windows install, I'd like to try that alongside. And then, as we mentioned, they've got Raspberry Pi support. I just want to see how that hangs together. Yeah, it makes for a confusing set of download options, but I guess, you know, it's nice to have those options. So either way, for an enthusiast, it's fine. I wonder how the cycle for users, are most endless users, you know,

sort of setting this up for themselves? Or is it something, you know, more institutional where, you know, someone can get these ISO files on the backend, maybe they're not even a computer expert, but they know enough to sort of get these files going and start flashing laptops with them and hand them out? Because it seems like once you get past that first phase, then yeah, I think we've all kind of thought like, oh yeah, I'm not going to be able to break this very easily,

or at least, you know, less knowledgeable Linux users certainly won't. I think our buddy Cass will speak to that a bit, but I got a vague sense when talking to him kind of like where their market is now for that kind of thing. And I think it's probably a lot of pre-installed, like somebody else is installing it for them. Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, really here, we're not experts. We're just kind of dabbling. We've done our whole summer of immutability. Endless is a fascinating, totally different approach. I think it also speaks to sort of the usefulness of tools like OS Tree and where those technologies are going.

But we wanted, you know, we wanted more details. And thankfully, our dear friend of the show, Cassidy James Blady, was willing to sit down earlier this week with Chris. He's now working at Endless and had a bunch of insights to share with us. So a big welcome back to the show, Cassidy. It has been too long. I think the last time you and I chatted might have been in person at System76 last year. Yeah, yeah, it's been a minute. A lot has changed for you since then.

So I know you're now over at Endless. I think probably the last time you were on the show, you were still at Elementary. Yeah. So tell us what you do at Endless and what your title is over there and all that jazz. At Endless, I'm the partner success engineer. And basically my job, it's funny because it's kind of this almost, what's the word, amorphous job description. But it's basically like, make sure that our partners are successful

and whatever's needed there. And practically what that means is I'm a bridge between the engineering team and partner organizations. So there's like other nonprofits, non-governmental organizations, sometimes governments that are deploying endless OS in various places around

the world. And I help make that happen. Interesting. Those sound like some pretty heavy hitter clients. It's interesting too, because knowing what I know about you and sort of your style and your taste, I think it seems like Endless is a really good fit because Endless OS itself is one of the most polished Linux distributions that I've ever used. And there's a lot that goes into making a distribution this nice, this well put together, and this accessible to end users. But yet, I wonder if you agree, because I know you've been around for a minute in the Linux community. It really doesn't feel like many people are talking about Endless. Why do you suppose it doesn't quite get the attention maybe say a mint

or or another distribution that's really desktop focused out there yeah well it's funny it definitely is kind of a sleeper sleeper os in a way um as far as within the linux community um and i think a big part of that is because the linux community shocker is not really the target audience of EndlessOS. And that's fine. And that's actually pretty cool. The target for EndlessOS is these partner organizations and people around the world who need a simple computer. And a lot of times, you know, there's a heavy education focus. We work with educational institutions like schools or school districts. And they'll deploy this in a school for kids who have only ever used a smartphone as their computer. And so this is their first computer, their first real computer. You know, that's a very different audience from what I think most people using Linux Mint or Fedora or whatever are going to be so and that's that i mean that speaks to the the

diversity of open source and um why i think it's cool you know you get a lot of flack sometimes people say oh why why don't all the distros come together make one super distro you know that's like this recurring almost like a meme at this point right it's like why can't we all just make one desktop environment one distro one os and while sometimes I do think companies venture out on their own a little too much and don't kind of work with the rest of the community, I think there's also a place for that. I think there's a place for, we have a target market. We have, I mean, at Endless, we have a decade of experience working with these organizations and these deployments around the world. A lot of times it's places with really low power computers with little or no internet

or very expensive internet. These are very different users than, say, a developer running Ubuntu. I think sometimes there's a place for that, for different solutions, for different people. It strikes me, though, that there's a bit of a dichotomy with this distribution because I think you just really did a really good job defining who the target user is. But yet, my early investigations into this, it feels like it's built on a lot of advanced technologies. I feel like I see Flatpaks incorporated way lower in the system than I've seen other distributions incorporate Flatpaks. Can you talk about that a little bit? And I'm actually not super clear on like the origin origins of this. Rob McQueen, our CEO, would actually be the person to like dive into the real interesting history here with Calabra and Lanaro. There was like some, like the origins of endless OS comes out of that somehow, somewhere. Basically it was the first or one of the first image-based linux operating systems so we use ostree for the operating system at a low level the whole the whole os is an ostree image and

updates come through as like a diff commits almost like git if you if you're familiar with ostree it's like git for operating systems it's it's actually the same technology that flatpak uses under the hood so the whole operating system's an image and you get updates to it and then the natural you know solution for apps on top of that is flat pack again similar technology or same technologies under the hood the biggest thing for us is like it has to be bulletproof it has to just work really well. And updates over extremely slow, extremely expensive data connections, updates have to come down and they have to be diffs of the OS. You can't download an entire 100 gigabyte or more image with all the educational content, especially. And you can't like download it halfway and then have it fail and download it again because you're paying per bit. download it halfway and then have it fail and download it again because you're paying per bit. So it has to be bulletproof. On the other side of the keyboard, on the user's side of the keyboard, you have somebody who can't debug it. Whether it's a kid at a school or maybe an administrator,

like a teacher or an administrator at a school who is not an IT person. The school may not even have an IT department. It's like, it just has to work. It has to work really well. And so that's really the reasons we use OS 3 image-based and Flatpak is we can't have package conflicts. We can't have any of that legacy issues that you might have had in the past on Linux. You know, we've been spending the summer

looking at immutable Linux distributions and Endless feels like the absolute peak implementation where maybe even at first pass, if you downloaded this and just use it, you wouldn't realize that it's an image-based OS at all. That's fascinating. And I imagine to pull that off, to integrate Flatpaks like they have, all of this, there must be a lot of upstream collaboration with the GNOME project and GTK. And I think this is an area where Endless is probably heavily involved and again, doesn't get very much attention. Yeah, I love this.

Like when I talk to friends about they're like, oh, Endless, I've kind of heard you guys like heard about you guys. Like, what do you do? I'm like, well, do you use GNOME software? Do you use Flatpak? Have you ever used Flathub? Have you ever used the power profiles work? have you ever done anything with metered data have you ever like if you've done any of that stuff you've used our software and because we've written it upstream uh if even

if you've like gone super wild experimental developer like if you're testing gnome os which is like the open secret gnome operating system that's you know just for ci or just just for testing and ci not on real hardware that uses the endless installer as its installer like we contributed that upstream to gnome much of the work going into gnome these days i want to take credit for everything like obviously there's so many people and there's such a diversity of people involved in gnome but like much of the work that you don't realize in the gnome community and the flat pack community is done by endless people i find that absolutely fascinating and of course users get

the benefit on all of the distributions but it creates this interesting situation where yeah endless isn't necessarily shipping the latest gnome base. It's like, what, 3.38 or something like that base still? And of course, GNOME 42 is out and they're working on 43. But yet, a lot of the features I'm now enjoying in current versions of GNOME are actually here in Endless already. Yeah, yeah. The metered data is a big example of that. And it was years ago, I went to a hack fest in, I think was in london at red hot office with a bunch of gnome people and i was there like i was half representing elementary and half representing

system 76 like this is the beauty of open source and all the companies and organizations involved in open source is like like i'm still involved with the exact same people as when i was working at system 76 doing elementary my free time and now i'm working at endless and but yeah the focus of that hack fest was metered data and parental controls and those were two features that didn't exist in gnome weren't standardized in any way uh they existed in endless os downstream and we endless sent people to like hey how do we design it in a way that not just works for us in our use cases we know we have weird use cases for our weird users, you know, compared to the broader Linux community. But how do we actually do it the right way upstream? And so now that's why parental controls is built in.

There's a, what's it called, malcontent, which is a great name for a library. It's a library for implementing parental controls and content-aware. And it piggybacks on the Flatpak and AppStream data. So you can restrict your apps that are opened based on what kind of contents they have. There's all these efforts that we've been kind of had our fingers in that really make for a really good experience

for any general-purpose operating system as well. Yeah, and it makes it safe as a family machine desktop os and that's nice and not one you have to tinker with yeah exactly yeah we hear a lot of people who are like hey i heard this endless os thing like i'm a developer it doesn't really make sense for me which first of all that's side note like i do a lot of development and i use endless os but i get Like maybe, maybe an Ubuntu or Fedora installer, something is better for you and that's fine. But like, we'll hear from these people, but I bought a laptop for my kid

and I threw endless OS on it and I just don't have to worry. And it's like, yes, exactly. You don't have to be an IT person to run it. You don't have to like worry about the content because it has parental controls built in and it's proven by tens of thousands of active users out there around the world

of like different cultures and different deployments in different countries. So it's a pretty safe bet. It's maybe one of the lesser known out there, but it should probably get more attention. I hear from listeners all the time who say, well, I ended up getting a Mac or I switched to Windows for a bit. I just got too frustrated. And my thought was, is always like, well well you should try something like endless yeah you know because you still get to use linux you get that environment but you've got that bulletproof image base flat packs for the applications you know as we kind of wrap up this this little summer journey

into immutable linux i wonder if you agree that it's going to take a long time but i could see in five to ten years your average users that are you know by they're getting linux systems maybe they're shipped from a manufacturer for office work and enterprise work and school work doesn't it seem like just the the trend is going to be all of those are inevitably going to be immutable based systems image based systems in some way just because of the the problems that solves for everyday users seems inevitable to me what about to you yeah absolutely i i'm actually more surprised that it's not already happening sooner if that makes sense like i've been using silver blue off and on kind of it for a while it

was like my way to see what gnome was up to before i was as deeply involved in the gnome community because i just knew you know i don't really want to fiddle with honestly it was like for me i wasn't used to fedora package management and so i was like if i just i can't do fedora package management with uh with silver blue i knew there's rpm ostry and stuff but like so that was the reason i started on silver blue and i think it was like there on fedora 34 and then that install i upgraded to 35 and 36 i upgraded to like the alpha of 36 and rolled back to 35 and that was like flawless that's like what sold me and like what blew my mind was like yeah oh this this is just this is just the way it should be this is just the right way to do it and and i think like i think all the right people all the important people working on things know that i think the hurdles we have to get over is like developer tooling which i'll say with like

with toolbox and flat pack builder and stuff the developer experience is actually really good too i'm still kind of getting used to doing everything in a toolbox but but it's really nice to have that separation between your host os and your development environment and it's a sound concept here's maybe here's my hot take i would be shocked if fedora doesn't switch to like silver blue as the default within the next three years maybe that's i feel like a safer bet i was gonna say five but i was like let's be aggressive yeah five was my bet so three is a little aggressive but that it it's wild. And I feel like I've had a blind spot on all of this really until about April and then June of this year when I really started paying attention at the beginning of summer.

It's just funny because you look at it and after you've used it for a bit, you're like, oh, well, clearly this is the way it's going. Yeah. And it solves so many problems. I was talking with the GNOME design team last week, and they're working on some new features in GNOME software, some new designs, and it's like, you know, this would just be so much easier if we didn't have to worry about DEBs and RPMs, and if it was just images for the OS and flatpaks for the OS and flat packs for the apps. And honestly, that's how I have Silverblue. That's how EndlessOS is set up. It really is nice once you kind of just accept that's how it works. It's real nice. Yeah, you get in that workflow and it functions really good. It's really solid.

You have modern applications. You're not stuck to just what's in the repo and you have that bulletproof reliability. It's such a win. Well, Cassidy's been really fun to dig into this. Endless looks like just a beautiful OS. It's just a really great piece of work. And stay in touch. Thanks for coming on and chatting with me and keep up the great work. Sounds good. Thank you.

Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Get started with a free trial for yourself or a team or an enterprise at Bitwarden.com. I started as an individual user and now I use it for my business. And Bitwarden makes it really simple all along the way to just have really great password and security hygiene and store your secrets in a safe place. I imported from my old password manager years ago. And then it was also very simple for others on our team to import from their password managers. And now we can all work collaboratively. And as a team, we use that daily, right? But as a business owner, I take some security in knowing that Bitwarden is open source and it's trusted by

millions of individuals in their community. Wes and I use it every single day personally and for our work stuff. And Bitwarden has been adding features at an incredible clip. New stuff all the time, like cross-domain identity management, of course, username generator, which I think is just brilliant. And they've worked with email relay services. So you can actually even give a unique email, a unique username, and a unique password for every site or service you use. And Bitwarden is the only way I think it's reasonable to stay secure across mobile and desktop devices. And of course, they have a Flatpak app. So it's one of the very first things I install so I can start authenticating everything because like everything needs a login these days.

And then, of course, I also have to log into my mobile device. And like, am I going to have like this crazy three or four sentence long password that I type in manually every single time? Of course not. Of course not. And Bitwarden is the best way to manage that. And it's all your secrets. And you can also put your two-factor tokens in there, which is really convenient. And they make it really simple to manage your personal stuff and your business stuff. I can attest to that. You can keep them separated, but easily switch between them. On top of all of that, you can get ease of mind with their Vault

health reports. It's so great bringing it all together. And then when you add the new features, just the really smart stuff that they've been like laser accurately adding to Bitwarden. Oh, it's such a great time to become a Bitwarden user. If maybe you've already done it, you know what? I'd be surprised if you haven't because it is really self-evident. So if you have, maybe you could suggest this to someone else. It's a great way to support the show as well.

Maybe your workplace could use this. We all have a friend or a family member that could probably do passwords better, better than the sticky under their keyboard. I won't name names, but I have more than one family member that used to do it that way. I gave the gift to Bitwarden. You can too. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. One more time to go get it for yourself or for a team. Bitwarden.com slash linux. One more time, to go get it for yourself or for a team, bitwarden.com slash linux. As always, we got some great feedback this week. If you want to send us some, you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Former Gentour sent two ideas I think were worthy of discussion. The first is just a little feedback on Tailscale.

They say, Hey, wonderful team. I've been listening to y'all for a year now, and I'm eternally grateful for Tailscale, which I learned about from you and which I've been using to roll out my own VPN for the family. We're spread out through three continents. I take a good look at every single one of your software recommendations.

Thank you. Isn't that nice? That is nice. I don't think we can take full credit for Tailscale. You know, I think the team over there did some of the work too. We just are standing on the shoulders of giants with Tailscale. We have the easy job of just being fans. I do like it a lot. It's, it's, to me, it's the same type of game changer that FileSync was and SSH was. Like it's a, it's a whole step change in functionality and i guess always some some shout outs to old jason donenfeld for uh for warguard in the freaking first place also another favorite tool of the show is nebula it's another really great one that you can completely host yourself uh you need to set it up a little bit more versus tail scale it's like a you know especially for some of your you

know if you have like staticky back-end infrastructure that you have deployed like nebula is great and super minimal and fast and clean if you've got you know like a great example would be just a couple of systems or vps's spread out across a couple of providers and maybe like a local box and you're planning to keep them forever you don't really need mobile a mobile device in there i think nebula would work really well for that former Former Gentour continued, I haven't heard you mention Keybase at all. The client is open source. The server is not-ish. It uses GNU PG to implement and end encryption for several sorts of things. Full featured chat, group chat, file sharing, Git repos even, and general encryption slash decryption of files. It can

even act as a sort of social network where you follow people and can view their public file folders as well as privately chat with them. Works right on Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, iPhones, and of course it has a pretty capable command line interface as well. The former startup was acquired by Zoom in 2020 after those first security shenanigans, but everything on the client side still remains open source. Chris, I think you've used Keybase in the past, have you not? Or you've explored it? I remember that. Yeah, I guess I still technically have an active Keybase account. I'm kind of sad Keybase never really took off more. It felt like it was out of all of like the sort of social things. I think it was a little early. It was a little complicated.

But what it really gave you is a way to verify who you are, you know, because they if you go look at like a key base profile, you can find mine. Key base dot IO slash Chris Elias, I think. And if you go there, you'll see sort of like these ways I verify this is actually my identity. And that's pretty useful in, you know, the current world that we live in. And so I do that via some, you know, GPG keys. You can do that via Bitcoin addresses. You can do that via by proving a tweet, a GitHub entry, your Reddit account. I also put a file at jupiterbroadcasting.com that verifies that, you know, just to show that it's me.

And I think that's a great concept. And then now they have a Slack-like chat interface. It works on Linux. Yeah, they have built a lot of kind of cool tools around Keybase. And it does seem like if you've taken the time to kind of set up your Keybase infrastructure and, you know, verify all these things and connect all your keys and identities, it can be well worth it. Because it kind of integrates all very nicely in a way that feels a little disparate and thrown out all over the place sometimes

with our other solutions. I think really the truth is, though, and you just can't overlook it, you can't just shrug it off, is that Zoom bought them. And I think that just leaves everybody with a little bit of a bad taste in their mouth. Especially considering the folks

who were probably some of the primary consumers of Keybase, right? Like it was never probably going to be a giant mainstream thing it was going to be for like privacy folks and tech nerds and all of whom are a little sketched out by zoom maybe i think that's part of it right and it's not like they've messed it up they've pretty much just left it alone it really doesn't seem like they've they've screwed up the product but i guess that could change at any point and i think it's just a non-starter issue for some people. Like, honestly, if I tried to get you on a print and I told you all about Keybase and then I told you it's owned by Zoom, wouldn't that give you pause?

There's a hesitation for sure. Yeah, I would say so. And now it is time for Le Boost. Our first non-baller boost of the day from our friend bronze wing with 9001 sats it's over 9000 i've been listening to you for about a year now and a question just crossed my mind well hey hey welcome to the show broswing we're glad to have you their question though how do you guys all know each other or how did you all meet? That feels like a big question.

I'm kind of glad this came up because it's all starting to fade for me. So, I mean, I remember. Wait, have we always known each other? And we've always been doing this show. I don't really remember a before. Right. This is just a side. Realized last week, several weeks late,

that Linux Unplugged has been running longer than Linux Action Show. Whoa, that is cool. Isn't that mind-blowing? I believe Coder Radio has been too. Perhaps not in total years, because we took some time off and we did Computer Action Show. We fooled around for a little bit, tried twice a month for a bit. But yeah, definitely in episode numbers and maybe an actual runtime so i remember that for episode 100 of the unplugged program we did a barbecue meetup and uh wes came with uh food and commentary and uh then i think it's just been every week since

then it's pretty much pretty much we got much. We got some Mexican food and talked about show stuff at one point, I seem to recall. Oh, okay. And he invited me back a couple of times, like, hey, yeah, you want to come on again? And then at some point I just stopped leaving. Or I just started showing up, I guess. I don't know if I was invited or not. I do like to warm people up with a little El Precios. That's one of my maneuvers.

Now that you're talking about it, i sort of recall us revisiting it might have been for episode 400 that that you did a revisit and you had a clip from the barbecue and wes's first like on the air clip and i think that was pretty great and i remember playing it back and it was like you'd think wes had been doing it for 100 episodes like he just hit the ground running so i was like well this guy's got to get on the show Brent remind me how did we meet I I must have been through the shows Linux Fest okay yeah what else do you remember it's like I say it's all fate that's why we got it it's good we do this yeah it is I think Linux Fest is probably a well both a great place to meet people and also a place where those memories just get sort of squashed and there's so much happening and yeah this was LinuxFest Northwest

so I think it was must have been maybe 2017 would be my best guess wow really yeah and I had planned I was living in northern Ontario at the time and I had planned to see my brother who was out here in BC and also do a little road trip to go to my very first Linux Fest. And that happened to be Linux Fest Northwest. And of course, as a JB fan boy at the time, I wanted to meet all the folks. And I ended up driving from BC, I think. Oh yeah, in a row. Oh, that was, what a crazy time. Anyways, I rented a car and drove from BC across the border into the US and made my way to the Linux Fest Northwest parking lot the night before the event started.

And it was so late and I didn't have a hotel. I had a tent, but there was nowhere to pitch it. And I was like, okay, I guess I'm going to sleep in the back of this car that I've rented, which is not the first time I've done this. And you're in a pinch, you know, you're very resourceful, Brent. Right. I did bring water. And I ended up sort of on campus where they hold LinuxFest Northwest. And I just so happened to find Jupes. And I was like, whoa, I think I'm in the right place. I don't know exactly where to go when the event starts, but I know at least I'm in the right

vicinity. Yeah, we were there overnight camping as know at least I'm in the right vicinity. Yeah, we were there overnight camping as well. So we were there the night before. That's true. And we're kind of hard to miss. Right. And then as I was parking, I was like, well, I don't want to park too close to be like that creep that's, you know, just within the bounds of the creepy creepiness. But not so far that I don't like, I don't know. So I picked a spot camp there.

I think it was like two or three nights in that car. It's crazy. So I met you at the booth the very first time you probably met a hundred people at that booth. So I don't think you remember. No, is that true? I thought we met in the, I thought we met in the parking lot in the morning when we let Levi out to go to the bathroom and you were out kind of like waking up and stretching. Oh yeah. Oh, you're right. I mean, I'm not a morning person, so, but yeah, you're right. I was like, I don't know, brushing my teeth or something out of a, out of a bottle or something. And my, my first thought was, did this guy, did he time it so that way we'd be, he'd be out there when we came out? Like, I was wondering, was he waiting for us?

I do remember that night it rained like crazy too and i had my windows open and that caused some issues oh man oh yeah good memory yeah i i was aware that i didn't want to like jump you guys at that point and be one of those one of those people so i was hopefully i left enough space but you know levi's a conversation starter and i'm pretty sure we got to talking and you know. Yeah. And, uh, so thankfully I, that meant, well, you guys were great. You, as, as all the fans who've met, you know, that, uh, you just invited me in and gave me a tour of, of Lady Jupes and Levi and I became friends immediately. And, uh, I think that just started sort of a friendship. And then a few days later, you invited us, of course, to a barbecue at the studio. And I think I never left. I remember sleeping on the floor of the studio one night.

And I just had a great time. Those post-LinuxFest parties at the studio, they get out of hand. Yeah, wonderfully so. And Alan was there and a whole bunch of people. It was a great time. Right. We probably had several projects going on. I'm sure you just got, you know.

You? No. Yeah. It's funny how those LinuxFests can be life-changing. That's exactly what it was. It was like me going to live out a small dream that I had for a few years. And it was even better than I would have expected. And I remember taking a bunch of photos and being able to share those, which was fun.

And that friendship just grew from there. And I was able to, actually, the way I started with Linux Unplugged just by chance was that at that time, I said to you, hey, if I can help in any way, let me know.. You said, well, okay, well hit me up in like two weeks. Cause it's kind of insane right now. And so I did. And you were like, Oh, well actually Wes is like going to Bali or something. And I need a co-host for Linux unplugged for a short time. You want to join me? I was like, sure. Let's see how this goes. I've yeah. Right., right? I was super nervous back then, but you were kind enough to give me a try and then I never left.

I bet we talked about digital photography. I was fascinated. A professional photographer using Linux. You don't see those every day. Bronzewing, thank you for the boost. That was a fun conversation and good refresher. Get all that recalled before we forget it. But the boosts, they must go on. That was a fun conversation and good refresher. Get all that recalled before we forget it.

But the boosts, they must go on. Our next one is from Sully86 with 5,000 sats. A longtime listener in Australia here. I'm using Fountain thanks to JB, so I'm boosting back the free sats I received from them. Well, thank you, Sully. Wow, that's a decent return there on the stream of sats 5000 for listening to podcasts. That's a feature in Fountain FM is they kind of have like this

incentive system. And so we've been getting more boosts from new from new timers who are just listening to the shows, collecting the sats and then sending them back through boosts. And I've been doing the same thing. It's been fun. Sully goes on. I work in IT. And of course, we're all Microsoft. I have managed to have most of my workflow in Linux. However, the most important thing is Outlook and.msg files. I like using Outlook on the web. However, the business workflow and ticketing system relies on those.msg files. Got any ideas on how I can open.msG files in Linux without needing to convert the files? Thanks for the great content. The not needing to convert is tricky. I would say it's worth

seeing what Evolution can do. I think you'd be really surprised at how easily Evolution integrates in with an Outlook ecosystem. But it's a lot to install. Personally, I would just make a copy of stuff and I would convert it. I don't know about you, Wes, but that's what my approach would be. Yeah, probably. It sounds like maybe there's some ways to get Thunderbird to play decently there too, although I have not tried that. And then as a last resort, we'll have a link to MSG Convert, which if you have to go to a conversion-based workflow, it looks like a, I think it might even be derived from Thunderbird

and it's a little Perl script to handle MSG conversions. I think of it as backup, right? Don't think of it as a conversion and duplication. Think of it as backup. Wolfman wrote in with 500 sats, just completed my resume, getting my amateur radio license. And then it occurred to me, does anyone else at JB have their ham license? I've never heard the topic come up on air before. Something like a DMR repeater or hosting a community DMR server sounds like something the community may get interested in. I kind of agree. We don't talk about ham much. I don't know much about it, but I think it's super cool. And every time Noah is around, I try to get him to talk about it but i think it's super cool and i every time noah is around

i try to like get him to talk about it so i can like you know learn some language or he even though it noah's even left a few devices here so we technically have devices i don't know i don't know if i'm allowed to use them you know yeah you know i think cheese was interested in that stuff too i remember him doing some like emergency preparedness stuff in his area during you know remember when they got flooded and stuff like that down in texas so i think he's got some experience if i remember definitely seems like there's a lot of sort of kindred spirits there right like this sort of hosting it yourself learning how this technology works understanding the physics and computers all involved like yeah that's some excellent geekery right there. It's the original decentralized. We got a boost 2,222 sats, row of ducks, from someone named nix-bitcoinisamazing.

I love that. Welcome back, nix-bitcoin. It's been a bit since we've heard from you. This is what got me into nix, so I obviously agree. They're right. Have you considered an AC enclosure in your garage for the server? The enclosure keeps the machines cool and clean. However, if the AC stops running for any reason, then the enclosure will actually turn into a furnace.

Chris, I feel like you and I talked quite a bit about this, I think almost exactly a year ago when we built, oh no january we built the server rack and we had many conversations about this and those were some of the hesitations was like okay well if we put in some infrastructure someone has to maintain that infrastructure as well so how can we do it i had some ideas about doing it passively but i wonder what your thoughts are now that you've been living with the heat again of course i've been all over the spectrum on this i am beginning to discount colo we got we got more boosts that came in just like i want i want a second the the colo stuff cool cool your role on that we got some people that that had that opinion and you know we've talked about maybe building a box in the garage but jeff and i were talking before the show started. You know, Jeff's been out here.

He's seen the studio. You think maybe we could do it with some insulation and decent cooling, or at least we have a shot. Yeah, I think if we insulate the garage attic, because those are typically not insulated at all, maybe double insulate, you know, where it usually is at the barrier of the roof, and then up top with the rafters,

and then definitely insulate the garage door itself um that might be enough with a little you know a fan a little bit of airflow it doesn't get too hot up there yeah and if it you know if we kept it somewhere in the 80 degree range you know you'd maybe even a little higher i'd be fine with that the servers have survived that you know it's all used gear well and we don't need it to be necessarily perfect uptime you know like if there was okay there's two heat we heat. Well, and we don't need it to be necessarily perfect uptime. You know, like if there was, okay, there's two heat waves a year and we shut it down for those, that's at least a lot better than where we're at now. I foresee me being in the attic here in a week or two.

I could see that coming. I'll bring a suit. You know what? We'll bring Jeff up with us after the road trip, right? And all of us will come up and we'll insulate the garage. Let's make a plan and I'll take the time off. Let's all right well that way brent can record up there yeah all right you're right that'll be soundproof very good i think it could work guys i think it could work all right then i just have a couple of shout outs a 50 sats from vip torso listening from finland for over a year sent in 50 sats from VIP Torso, listening from Finland for over a year.

Sent in 50 sats. That's like a penny. But it's just amazing that you can do it, right? Like, that's what I think people have to appreciate about Lightning. We got a row of ducks from Mr. Quackers who said he's thinking about changing his name. Whoa. Yeah, he's thinking about changing his name. I would be sad.

I like Mr. Quackers. I think we have a really great soundbite that goes with it. Quack Yeah, he's thinking about changing his name. I would be sad. I like Mr. Quackers. I think we have a really great soundbite that goes with it. Quacka, quacka, it's a treasure. Yippee! Pick your new name based on soundbite ability. That's all I'm asking. We got 2,000 sats from TrevDev, who said, loves gooics. You know, geeks?

I call it gooics, but it's geeks. I know we're drawing the summer of immutability to a close but but maybe i need to sneak geeks in there good now use this scheme yeah ah there's only so many days in the summer though we also got 2323 sats from logic uh he boosted when we were live and we had we were having some trouble last week and he's helping troubleshoot so i'm going to be leaving helipad up during live shows we don't actually have the live tag yet but some people are still boosting in during the show so i don't want to miss those if you'd like to send us a boost go grab a new podcast app newpodcastapps.com podverse is totally free it's an f-droid it's on ios it's an android and it's going to be all over our new website

so then you really get like the trifecta because the web the mobile apps gpl it's going to be all over our new website. So then you really get like the trifecta because the web, the mobile apps, GPL, it's gorgeous. You heard us talk about Fountain. That's one that lets you actually earn sats for listening to podcasts. And Castomatic is great on iOS as well. There's a whole bunch over at newpodcastapps.com, including Breeze. You don't have to change your podcast app. And Boost CLI if you really want to be a geek. We got a bag of picks here. And what do you say, Wes? Should we give just a mention to VisiData? That was one of the many tools that you use to go sort the hat to get

our JPL names. Yeah, we definitely should just because you know how we love dirty command line picks. And this is one that multiple audience members, you know, anytime we talked about fun little command line tools or especially like command line spreadsheets or like data manipulation or charts, VisiData came up, and I hadn't had a chance to actually play with it until I was kind of going through these CSVs

that we got out of our Next cloud. I'm thinking, you know, there's got to be a better way. I don't really want to do this in a browser. I definitely don't need LibreOffice installed on this machine. And I have a terminal. VisiData was perfect. You can do operations on multiple rows, multiple columns. You can do pivot tables.

You can do charts. And because it's all like powered with Python, you can just run your own Python scripts on the data powered by VisiData. It's pretty rad. It was very handy. I think this is probably a tool we'll be going to for these types of things in the future. And I love that it has pivot tables.

Minimac sent in a Google Teller pic. This one's kind of creepy, isn't it, Minimac? Yeah, that's a really cool one. We will love that one. So I was reading my favorite news site, which is their standard Arteikel, an Austrian news site. Give it a try if you're familiar with the German language. So they wrote an article about that tool Google Teller.

And that is a tool that gives you some feedback from your internal computer speaker whenever there is some data exchange between your browser and one of the Google servers and services, like Google Search, Google Ads, Google Fonts, YouTube, whatever. So imagine the situation you have Google Chrome or Chromium open, and you type something in the address bar. In these two browsers, you have the active word prediction active. So whenever you type a letter in there, your computer starts beeping.

And that, in the end effect, means every single address you type in in Google Chrome and Chrome in the address bar gets sent to Google. Everything. Everything. Other example, you have an ad blocker, you don't have an ad blocker, and you start loading your favorite snoot site when your computer is screaming because of all the Google ads, for example. Or, interesting fact, you have the whole site loaded and you start scrolling around and all of a sudden you have these beeps again because i don't know some cookie sends the exact position you are on that site or some other info to google it is really a weird interesting experience so that that tool is really worth playing you will find the code on github you have to compile it

and it's only working in linux for now because it works in combination with other IP tables. But in fact, the installation instructions and usage are well described. And I guess you will do a link in the show notes. You got it. We will have a link in the show notes. If you want a little audible indication that motivates you to get rid of Google as fast as possible, that's the way to do it. Imagine combining that

with a game plan to migrate off Google in one week to just really get you across the finish line. You should treat it maybe like a radar detection tool, you know, where you hear those little beeps and you worry about your safety. And then, Brent, we have a feedback item that came in. It's a feedback pick. We do. Josh wrote in and suggested Espanso. I think it's probably the best way to say that. It's an open-source text expander that has builds for Windows, Linux, and Mac,

with Wayland and M1 beta support as well. Get out of here. Yeah, I know. As you might have expected, it's also written in Rust. Are you serious? That's great. So this is really handy because TextExpander is one of these independent tools on the Mac. I think it's, I don't know.

But you set a, you type a sequence of characters, you know, like some sort of short code that you've created. And then it will expand that to like a whole set of predefined text that supports variables and whatnot super common for like just doing rapid replies to emails or some sort of repetitive thing that you have to type a lot you add a short code for it and then it expands it out into a fuller sentence or whatever it might be maybe it's you want to insert your address or your email address and you don't want to type it out every single time or a web address or maybe it's a block of code and it's a really handy tool i've tried it i find it to be really heavy on the mac and expensive so i didn't actually i've never really tried it for a prolonged period of time but the idea that you can get this working on wayland is huge because i kind of had given up on this concept i thought this is going to be something

i could only do on x11 so this is a fantastic find plus it looks like it's gpl3 i mean that's kind of rad and rust and quick and a really slick little website and a nice little repo and seemingly some good docs what a find this is a treat like pretty often we've heard of the apps that get sent in but oh my gosh and it has packages of course all these things have packages so you can extend it add more stuff shell script support form support oh that's nice so you can extend it, add more stuff. Shell script support. Form support. Oh, that's nice.

So you can add, you can replace some of the variables. Oh, this is getting installed after the show, gentlemen. That's what I say. They've got a tab. There's an app image here. Hey, yo. Hey, Wes, see if it's in the next package. Not this problem again.

I'm sure it's in there. You are, dang it. Well, that was great. If you want to send us in something, either a boost or a regular old email, that's just great. You can head over to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I'm curious to know out there if anybody out there has endless OS in production, or maybe you've deployed it for somebody. If that's you, send us a boost or send us an email and let us know how you're using

it. I'm trying to get a sense of how well it's known in our audience. I guess on that same token, I would like to know if you'd never heard about it. Let us know that too. I'd like some, just some kind of data points around EndlessOS and how it's perceived out there or how it's getting used. And if you want to join us live on a Sunday, we do this show over at jupiter.tube at noon Pacific, you want to join us live on a Sunday, we do this show over at jupiter.tube at noon pacific, 3pm eastern. And something that we do for our members at unpluggedcore.com is we record this live stream, which is huge. It's like two hours and 20 minutes-ish. It's getting close to that right

now as we go. It's just a lot more show. We have some stuff we're doing. We got business we're attending to, and you get to listen in on all that see how the podcast sausage is made and we also make an ad-free version available as well if you just prefer something short concise and fully produced by our editor drew that's unpluggedcore.com if you'd like to support the show and keep us independent that's like the turkey bacon to the sausage of the full show yeah and you can get the full like what would it be when you do the jupiter? Would that be like the meat pack or what? What is that? Like it's a veggie burger stack, like full English breakfast. Yeah. Get the full English breakfast over at Jupiter.

Party support. All the shows get all the features. You pick which shows the blood sausage though. You had to go there, Wes. No, Wes. No. I'm going to get that visual out of my head. I think I like mashed potatoes. Maybe one of them is mashed potatoes. Maybe one of them is catfish. I don't know.

You let me know. I don't know. Don't miss Linux Action News. That's all I know. That's all I know. LinuxActionNews.com. We're covering the stuff that really matters in the world of Linux and open source every single week. We'd love you to catch it. So go

grab that. And links to everything we talked about today over at linuxunplugged.com slash 473. You get our Mumble info, our Matrix info, the contact form, all of it over there. And go check out the new site, new.jupyterbroadcasting.com. Let us know what you think. Thanks for joining us.

See you right back here next Sunday. So let's talk about that new website. Like, we're down to the final hours. Is it hours? I thought we had days. I think you could measure it in actual hours. That's right. It's true. We need a countdown. We need a countdown. Some say it is the final countdown.

Final countdown. We don't have a license for that. Well, I could just sing it. It's fine. It's definitely the last kind of week for what we have. I mean, I had it, so I had to use it. Well, if you got it. Use it if you got it. Blunt it.

Yeah, I feel like it's definitely, we can say it's the last week for what we're calling the 1.0 milestone of the website i think maybe the three of us should have some discussions on whether or not the current website does everything we need on the as far as the back end goes but as far as front end i feel like the new website has gotten really far chris i know there's a bunch of like features that have been implemented in the last what week or week and a half that have been helping you quite a bit, like the PeerTube embed and stuff like that? That's my favorite one, let's be honest. There's so much good work going in, so I don't want to play favorites.

I love all my children, but how awesome is this? So I may have mentioned this already, but now when you go to the new.j Jupiter broadcasting dot com site and you click live. That site will auto embed the current live stream from peer to just automatically gives you the current live stream. We don't have to do anything. We don't have to put embed code in there. It just drops it right in there. No updates, no manual stuff.

It's awesome. And it's great because it's a static website too so the way you really have to do that is you'd have to go edit the site rebuild the site redeploy the site right so it's so nice that it just automatically and you know embeds and updates it's coming along um i think it's getting really close to a 1.0 i think there's a little few you know there's a few things like down here we can still clean up down to the bottom and stuff like that but yeah there's there's a bit of stuff to do. But I feel like the essentials.

The important part is like all the, you know, all the bones, right? All the pieces that like are hard to figure out or can it work that way? It seems like that is all resolved. And now it's kind of just the polishing layers. And I want to say a huge kudos to everyone who's been helping on this project. I've been super impressed with how many people have been involved in the Matrix room, but also the number of people who've been committing ideas and changes and opinions and all of that to the project. So thank you to everyone. It's important to say that Kyle Potts put in quite an amazing PR last week, and it just got merged, I think, a day or two ago. They wrote some intent testing via Playwright for the site. And I am still on the very edge of beginning to understand what that means.

on the very edge of beginning to understand what that means, but I think it helps us test the commits that are coming in in a way that emulates browsers. That's going to be super helpful for us not breaking the site in production, which we've done a few times in the last few weeks. So that sounds like an amazing tool. I'm looking forward to learning it. I don't know if either of you have played with that. Wes, maybe you have,

but we're certainly going to talk more about it in Office Hours this coming Tuesday. Great. OfficeHours.here